Turn Evil's cast time has been increased to 1.7 seconds and now has a 6-second duration in PvP (down from 8 seconds).

A minor Raid utility ability (to-be-determined) will be added for Hunters.

Amplify Magic amplifies the effects of helpful magic, increasing all healing received by 12% for all party and raid members within 100 yards, and lasts 6 seconds with a 2-minute cooldown.

Tank Vengeance and Resolve

For plate-wearing Tank specializations, Riposte has been redesigned to convert Critical Strike into Parry, a defensive stat

Riposte is a passive ability for Blood Death Knights, Protection Paladins, and Protection warriors.

Riposte now gives the character Parry equal to their Critical Strike bonus from gear.

All tanking stances and similar effects now increases threat generated by 900% (up from 600%).

Death Knight

Heart Strike has been removed. Blood Death Knights should use Pestilence in its place.

DruidSummary of changes to Balance:

Balance Energy is a bar that automatically cycles back and forth between Lunar and Solar sides, like night and day. The closer to one end that the bar is, the more damage that side's spells do.

Balance Druids now have four rotational spells.

Starfire: Lunar direct damage spell

Cast when the Lunar side is stronger

Wrath: Solar direct damage spell

Cast when the Solar side is stronger

Moonfire: Lunar periodic damage spell. While closer to Solar, this button is replaced with Sunfire, a Solar periodic damage spell.

Maintain both effects where possible

Starsurge: Direct damage spell that benefits from whichever side is stronger. Has up to 3 charges, and buffs the damage of the next few Wraths or Starfires.

Cast when able to follow up with a few strong Wraths or Starfires.

See the patch notes below for further detail on the Balance Druid changes.

The maximum number of charges that can be accumulated for Savage Roar has been reduced to make its uptime more consistent between short and long periods of tanking.

Lacerate now generates 5 Rage, has no cooldown (down from a 3-second cooldown), and the periodic bleed effect triggers every 1 second (down from 3 seconds).

Savage Defense can now accumulate 2 charges (down from 3 charges).

Glyph of Savagery has been renamed Glyph of Savage Roar, and now grants a free 5 Combo Point Savage Roar when leaving Prowl, instead of allowing Savage Roar to be used with 0 Combo Points.

Genesis now consumes all of the Druid's Rejuvenation effects on party or raid members within 60 yards and applies the Genesis effect to them instead. Genesis heals the target for an amount equal to the remaining healing from the consumed Rejuvenation effects over 3 seconds. Healing from Genesis counts toward Wild Mushroom as if it was from Rejuvenation.

oul of the Forest (Restoration) when casting Swiftmend, the Druid gains Soul of the Forest. Soul of the Forest reduces the cast time of the next Healing Touch by 50%, or increases the healing of the next Regrowth, Rejuvenation, or Wild Growth by 100%.

Feral Dream of Cenarius: Increases the healing of Healing Touch and Rejuvenation by 20%, and causes them to also heal the Druid when cast on allies. Casting Healing Touch no longer increases the damage of the Druid’s next 2 melee abilities, or increases the healing of Rejuvenation.

Hunter

Beast Mastery Hunters retain Bestial Wrath. Rapid Fire is a good fit for Marksmanship, and we improved it. For Survival, we wanted to both increase the prominence of their traps, and give them a new damage cooldown. So, a new trap called Bear Trap has been created to fit that role.

Bear Trap is a new ability for Survival Hunters. Bear Trap places a trap with duration of 1 minute that immobilizes the first enemy that triggers it for 8 seconds and deals heavy bleed damage over 20 seconds. Damage from other sources may break the immobilization effect. The ability has a 4 minute cooldown.

Careful Aim now also provides its effect against all targets when Rapid Fire is active.

Aimed Shot now deals 20% more damage, no longer interrupts Auto Attacks, and can be cast while moving.

Mage

Nether Tempest can now only be on 1 target at a time (down from unlimited), but its secondary damage now hits all targets in range (up from only 1), deals 100% of the primary damage (up from 50%), and its damage is now increased by Arcane Charges.

The Brain Freeze effect now increases Frostfire Bolt damage by 25%, and can now stack up to 2 times.

Combustion's damage has been increased by 100%.

Monk

Soothing Mist's healing has been increased by 100%, its GCD has been reduced to 0.5 seconds, but no longer heals immediately, and no longer generates Chi.

Summon Jade Serpent Statue now has a 10-second cooldown (down from 30 seconds).

Thunder Focus Tea no longer costs Chi, causes the next Renewing Mist to jump up to 4 times (instead of causing the next Uplift to refresh the duration of Renewing Mists on all targets). Its effect on Surging Mist remains unchanged.

To better balance the damage of Brewmaster versus Windwalker where both share many of the same abilities, we removed the damage increase provided by Tiger Stance, and increased the damage of melee abilities to compensate.Stance of the Fierce Tiger no longer increases damage dealt.

When triggered, Tiger Strikes now grants a 25% increase to Multistrike for 8 seconds instead of a 50% increase to attack speed and double attacks for 4 attacks.

he Black Ox Statue has been modified to aid Monks in establishing aggro on new enemies instead of shielding allies. We also removed the Misfire effect, as it did not live up to its original idea, and was unnecessary.

Black Ox Statue no longer casts Guard on allies and now has a 10-second cooldown (down from 30 seconds).

Cascade no longer refreshes the duration of Renew for Chakra: Serenity.

Circle of Healing's cooldown is now 12 seconds (up from 10 seconds).

Chakra: Sanctuary no longer now increases healing of area-of-effect spells. It now causes healing spell casts to reduce the remaining cooldown on Circle of Healing by 1 second instead of always reducing the cooldown by 2 seconds.

Chakra: Serenity no longer now increases healing of single-target spells.

Divine Aegis no longer grants Power Word: Shield a chance to critically strike.

Power Word: Shield now has a chance for a critical effect based on critical strike chance and can Multistrike based on Multistrike chance for all specializations.

From Darkness, Comes Light has been split into Surge of Light for Discipline and Holy, and Surge of Darkness for Shadow for Shadow.

Solace and Insanity has been split into Power Word: Solace for Discipline and Holy, and Insanity for Shadow.

Surge of Light's activation chance has been reduced to 10% (down from 15%).

Angelic Feathers now increases movement speed by 60% (down from 80%).

Rogue

Worth noting here is the removal of Ambidexterity. This was done to reduce the amount of damage coming from auto attacks for Combat Rogues. We’ve increased the damage of their active abilities to compensate and make them more rewarding.

To better balance the scaling rates and value of secondary stats for Subtlety, we reduced the power of their Sinister Calling passive ability. Sinister Calling now increases Agility by 15% (down from 30%).

Tidal Waves now reduces the cast time of Healing Wave by 20% (down from 30%).

Unleash Life no longer increases the healing from Healing Rain but its direct healing has been increased by 100%.

Warlock

For Affliction, we're happy with their rotation. But, Drain Soul was causing them to be too strong in situations where they had a steady supply of small creatures to kill. We reduced the effectiveness of its on-kill effect in order to solve this. Drain Soul now creates 1 Soul Shard (down from 4 Soul Shards) when the target dies.

Kil'jaeden's Cunning was a problematic talent. We've reduced the ability for ranged damage dealers to deal damage while moving in Warlords. Kil'jaeden's Cunning became much stronger relative to other casters. We redesigned how the ability works to be more powerful in bursts instead of always affecting only some spells.Kil’jaeden’s Cunning has been redesigned. Kil'jaeden's Cunning calls upon the cunning of Kil'jaeden to permit movement while casting Warlock spells. This spell may be cast while casting other spells and lasts 15 seconds with a 2-minute cooldown.

Warrior

As mentioned in the above section on Ability Pruning, Overpower and Heroic Strike have been removed for Arms Warriors. In their place, Slam now costs less Rage, and Execute has been revised to provide more dynamic gameplay throughout the whole fight while still retaining its identity of a low-health finisher.

We’ve replaced Strikes of Opportunity with a new Mastery which accentuates their intended design. Mastery: Strikes of Opportunity has been removed, and replaced with a new ability, Mastery: Weapons Master.Mastery: Weapons Master increases the damage of Colossus Smash, Slam, and Execute abilities by 20% (increasing with Mastery).

Executioner is a new passive ability for Arms Warriors. Executioner causes the Warrior's auto attack hits to generate an additional 40 Rage against targets with less than 20% health remaining. Additionally, the Execute ability no longer requires the target to be below 20% health to use, but its Rage cost is increased by 100%.

Colossus Smash no longer increases the damage of Slam.

Mortal Strike now generates 20 Rage (up from 10 Rage).

Slam now costs 15 Rage (down from 25 Rage) and no longer has additional effects when Sweeping Strikes is active.

We made a revision to the critical strike chance of Bloodthirst to make them less crit-dependant. A new glyph has been added which gives Fury Warriors a choice for a notably different playstyle. Auto attack damage had become too high, so we also moved some damage from that into Execute (which has been changed to deal damage based on Weapon Damage, instead of just Attack Power). Plus, we've updated some to spell alerts to improve usability.

Crazed Berserker no longer increases auto attack damage. Instead, it also causes Execute to hit with the off-hand weapon.

lyph of Colossus Smash is a new glyph available to Fury Warriors. The glyph increases the duration of Colossus Smash's effect to 20 seconds, but reduces its effectiveness.

Blizzard

Welcome to an early look at patch notes for the upcoming World of Warcraft expansion: Warlords of Draenor. The new expansion introduces a wealth of new content and changes. There's also a new patch note format, which we hope will help better convey the reasoning for many of the changes being made and what they mean for you, while providing more background into issues we're trying to solve.

Please be aware that the Alpha patch notes are preliminary and not final. Details may change before retail release and new information will be added for additional features as development continues on the Warlords of Draenor expansion. Note: Not all the content listed may be available for immediate testing or may only be available during a limited testing window during the Alpha.

For more information about Alpha testing and how you can opt in for a chance to participate in the Warlords of Draenor beta test later down the line, check out Warlords of Draenor™ Alpha Testing Begins. Changes since last update to the Alpha patch notes are denoted in red.

Looking for a TL;DR summary of all of the changes? Here you go!

Character stats have been squished into smaller numbers that are easier to understand. It's important to understand that this is not a nerf as enemies have been squished as well.

A new row of talents has been added for level 100, and new Draenor Perks from levels 91 to 99.

The Garrison is a new feature available in Draenor, where you can build a base, recruit followers, and send them on missions.

Balanced functionality of Agility, Strength and Intellect.

New secondary stats: Bonus Armor, Multistrike, and Readiness.

Hit and Expertise have been removed; they're no longer needed in order to reliably land attacks!

The pace of healing has been adjusted to allow for more tactical decisionmaking regarding efficiency and throughput, on both single-target and multi-target heals. Passive and auto-targeted healing have been reduced in effectiveness in order to emphasize the actions and choices of healers.

Racial traits have been rebalanced so that all races have similar combat performance.

All classes have had several abilities pruned, with a focus on redundant and less-used abilities, to cut down on button and keybind bloat.

The amount of crowd control in the game (primarily PvP) has been drastically reduced. Many crowd-control abilities have been removed, and many diminishing returns categories are now merged together.

Several common buffs and debuffs have been merged, or removed, where they were redundant.

All characters now learn a few important Major Glyphs automatically as they level up.

The amount of instant healing in the game has been toned down by giving cast times to several instant cast heals.

Vengeance has been redesigned and renamed Resolve. Resolve does not increase outgoing damage, but does now increase tank self-healing and absorption based on damage taken.

Facing requirements (character position) on some prominent abilities have been loosened or removed.

The mana cost of Resurrection spells has been reduced to make it a little easier to recover from a wipe.

Professions no longer have combat benefit perks tied to them.

There are a multitude of class-specific changes, including things like improved distinction between different Talent specializations, and new Masteries. Consult the class-specific sections below for more information.

New Content

Level-100 Talents and Draenor Perks

A new row of talents has been added for level 100. For testing purposes, these are currently accessible at level 90.

Draenor Perks is a new feature that adds rewards for leveling. Over levels 91 to 99, you will earn these 9 new Draenor Perk in a random order. Each class and specialization has a different set of 9 Draenor Perks.

Level-100 talents have been added for all classes!

Draenor Perks have been added for all classes, earned from levels 91 to 99.

You can preview the new talents on the talent calculator at the fansites here. (Please note that the links below will take you to an external website.)

Game System Changes

Stat Squish

Character progression is one of the defining characteristics of a role-playing game. Naturally, that means that we're continuously adding more power to the game for players to acquire. After 4 expansions and over 9 years of this growth, we've gotten to a point where the numbers involved are no longer easy to grasp. And worse, much of the granularity that's available is tied up in tiers of older content from Molten Core to Dragon Soul, none of which are really relevant anymore. It's no longer necessary for Borean Tundra quest gear to be nearly twice as powerful as Landa Fatua quest gear, even though the two zones are only a couple of levels apart.In order to bring things down to an understandable level, we've reduced the scale of stats throughout the game, back to as if they continued scaling linearly through questing content from levels 1 to 90. This applies to creatures, spells, abilities, consumables, gear, other items... everything. Your stats and damage have been reduced by a huge amount, but so have creatures' health. For example, your Palla di Fuoco that previously hit a creature for 450,000 out of its 3,000,000 health (15% of its health), may now hit that same creature for 30,000 out of its 200,000 health (still 15% of its health). In effect, you will still be just as powerful, but the numbers that appear will be more easily parsed.It's important to understand that this isn't a nerf, and we have special handling in place to preserve players' existing ability to solo old content. Players will deal bonus damage against lower-level creatures from past expansions, and will take reduced damage from them.

We've also removed all base damage on player spells and abilities, and adjusted Attack Power or Spell Power scaling as needed, so that all specializations will scale at the same rate.

The amount of stats on items has been reduced to be much lower than before.

Creature stats have been reduced to compensate.

We've also streamlined the multitude of various types of Haste % and Crit % bonuses.

Primary Character Stats and Attack Power

The "primary" stats, Agility, Strength, and Intellect, are foundations of a character's power. But they have not been created equally, making it difficult to properly balance them against secondary stats. The leading reason for this is that Agility and Intellect also provide Critical chance, in addition to Attack Power or Spell Power, whereas Strength does not. In order to achieve better balance, we've removed the Critical chance increase from Agility and Intellect. Still, it felt like Agility-based characters should critically strike more often, so we've raised those classes' baseline Critical Strike chance to compensate.

Agility no longer provides an increased chance to critically strike with melee and ranged attacks or abilities.

Intellect no longer provides an increased chance to critically strike with spells.

The base chance to critically strike is now 5% for all classes. There are no longer different chances to critically strike with melee, ranged, and spells.

There is a new passive, named Colpi Critici, which increases chance to critically strike by 10%.

It is learned by all Rogues, all Hunters, Feral and Guardian Druids, Brewmaster and Windwalker Monks, and Enhancement Shamans.

"The "primary" stats, Agility, Strength, and Intellect, are foundations of a character's power. But they have not been created equally, making it difficult to properly balance them against secondary stats." We've consolidated the way that Attack Power and Spell Power function and scale, to make those values clearer and correct some scaling issues regarding caster weapons relative to physical weapons.

Each point of Agility or Strength now grants 1 Attack Power (down from 2). All other sources of Attack Power now grant half as much as before.

Weapon Damage values on all weapons have been reduced by 50%.

Attack Power now increases Weapon Damage at a rate of 1 DPS per 3.5 Attack Power (up from 1 DPS per 14 Attack Power).

Attack Power, Spell Power, or Weapon Damage now affect the entire healing or damage throughput of player spells.

Active mitigation has worked very well as a tanking model. So, moving forward we want to keep the amount of Dodge and Parry on tanks on the low side. This helps prevent encounters from causing very spiky damage on tanks, which generally isn't much fun. Dodge and Parry gains from Strength and Agility are being reduced to help accomplish this. Additionally, items in Warlords of Draenor will not have Dodge or Parry on them as a stat. Some Dodge and Parry can still be gained through class-specific effects.

The amount of Dodge gained per point of Agility has been reduced by 25%.

The amount of Parry gained per point of Strength has been reduced by 25%.

Itemization Changes (Updated)

We’re making a number of changes to itemization based on a single philosophy: We want to increase the chance that any given item drop is useful to someone in your group. To support this philosophy we’re making a few changes to stats. Most items found in Draenor will work for all specializations within a given class, so that you never have to grumble when you see, for example, Intellect plate drop in a group that lacks a Holy Paladin.

We’re also reducing the number of role-specific stats: Hit and Expertise are gone, as are Dodge and Parry as stats on items, replaced with a single tank stat of Bonus Armor. Armor and Spirit will be specific to tanks and healers respectively, but all other secondary stats will have universal appeal.

Because of the magnitude of this change, we’re retroactively applying this philosophy to items in Mists of Pandaria. After the pre-expansion patch you may find that some of your items contribute different stats, but they should still be good for your class.General

New secondary stats added:

Bonus Armor: Increases armor.

Multistrike: Grants a chance for spells and abilities to fire up to 2 additional times, at 30% effectiveness (both damage and healing).

Readiness: Reduces the cooldown on several abilities with long-cooldowns for the class. The tooltip for Readiness displays a list of affected abilities.

Hit and Expertise on all items have been replaced with a universally useful secondary stat. Stats that are not useful to your current class specialization will be grayed out in the tooltip rather than green, and will not be counted on your character stat sheet.

Spirit for non-healing specializations

Bonus Armor for non-tanking specializations

Strength for Agility/Intellect-users

Agility for Strength/Intellect-users

Intellect for Strength/Agility-users

For example, Intellect on a cloak will be greyed out for all Warrior specializations and they will not receive an increase to Intellect if equipped. However, if the same cloak is equipped by a Mage, Intellect will show up as green and they’ll receive the increase to their Intellect.

Mists of Pandaria and Future Items

Dodge and Parry have been replaced with Bonus Armor. If an item had both Dodge and Parry on it, it has been replaced with an additional useful secondary stat.

Mail and Leather Armor pieces will always have Agility and Intellect on it.

Hit and Expertise Removal

Hit and Expertise were not fun stats. They acted to remove a penalty, instead of making you stronger. Most players treated Hit/Expertise caps as mandatory (rightfully so), with failure to reach those caps as a trap of sorts. After adjusting, gemming, and reforging gear to meet that cap, players could then go after the actual damage-increasing stats. We decided to remove Hit and Expertise, and make it so you don't need them. We still want melee specializations to attack creatures from behind when possible, so attacks from the front will have a 3% chance to be parried that cannot be eliminated for non-tanking specializations.

General

All players now have a 100% chance to hit, 0% chance to be dodged, 3% chance to be parried, and 0% chance to glance, when fighting creatures up to 3 levels higher (bosses included).

Tank specializations receive an additional 3% reduction in chance to be parried, so tank attacks have a 0% chance to be parried vs. creatures up to 3 levels higher.

Creatures 4+ levels higher than you still have a chance to avoid your attacks in various ways, so as to discourage you from attempting to fight enemies that are much stronger than you.

Dual Wielding still imposes a 17% chance to miss, so as to balance it with two-handed weapon use.

Hit and Expertise bonuses on all items and item enhancements (gems, enchants, etc.) have been converted into Critical Strike, Haste, or Mastery.

Player Health and Resilience

We’re planning several interconnected changes designed to provide better-tuned gameplay for healers and improve the healing dynamic in PvP.

The high amount of base Resilience and Battle Fatigue in Mists of Pandaria caused characters to feel much weaker in PvP than they did in PvE. To address this disparity, we’re approaching Warlords of Draenor with the goal of shrinking that gap as much as possible. To reduce dependence on Resilience, we needed to increase player survivability against other players, and we chose to do this by essentially doubling (post-squish) player health.

On its own, that increase in health would make players more survivable in the world at large, so we’re also increasing creature damage and the effectiveness of healing spells to balance things out. The net result of these changes is that individual attacks will knock a smaller chunk off of a player’s health pool in PvP, but your survivability in PvE remains unaffected.

Doubling player health gave us room to reduce Resilience and Battle Fatigue, but our goal was to be able to remove them entirely. In order to achieve that, we’re also reducing PvP spike damage across the board by lowering Critical Damage and Critical Heals against players in PvP to 150% of their normal effect (down from 200%). Our hope is that these changes allow us to reduce Base Resilience and Battle Fatigue to 0%. It’s possible that we’ll still find a need for some minor amount of Base Resilience and/or Battle Fatigue, and we’ll be testing these changes extensively and adjusting as needed.

Base Resilience has been reduced to 0%.

Battle Fatigue has been removed. PvP combat no longer reduces the amount of healing received by PvP participants.

Critical Damage and Critical Heals in PvP combat now deal 150% of the normal spell/ability effects (down from 200%).

The amount of health per Stamina has approximately doubled. The curve on this calculation has been smoothed out as well, so the exact amount varies slightly by level.

Maximum mana has been approximately doubled at all levels to keep pace with the expected health from new Stamina values.

All consumables have had their healing and mana regeneration values approximately doubled.

All creatures have had their melee damage doubled. Most creature spells and abilities have had their damage doubled as well.

All player-cast healing and absorption effects have been increased by approximately 50% in effectiveness. If they heal or absorb a percentage of maximum health, they are instead reduced by 25%. All other noted changes are in terms relative to that.

For example, if another noted change is that "Mega Heal now heals for 40% more," that means that Mega Heal now heals for a total of 210% of what it used to, which is relatively 40% higher compared to other heals.

Retuning Healing Spells

One of our goals for healing is to tone down the raw throughput of healers relative to the size of player health pools. Currently, as healers and their allies acquire better and better gear, the percentage of a player’s health that any given heal restores increases significantly. As a result, healers are able to refill health bars so fast that we have to make damage more and more “bursty” in order to challenge them. Ideally, we want players to spend some time below full health without having healers feel like their groupmates are in danger of dying at any moment. We also think that healer gameplay would be more varied, interesting, and skillful if your allies spent more time between 0% and 100%, rather than just getting damaged quickly to low health, forcing the healer to then scramble to get them back to 100% as quickly as possible.To that end, we’re buffing heals less than we’re increasing player health. Heals will be deliberately less potent compared to health pools than before the item squish. Additionally, as gear improves, the scaling rates of health and healing will now be very similar, so the relative power of any given healing spell shouldn’t climb so much over the course of this expansion. For those concerned about what this means for raiding, don’t worry—we’re taking all of these changes into account when designing Raid content for Warlords of Draenor.

It’s also important to note that spells that heal based on a percentage of maximum health are being effectively buffed by the massive increase to player health pools, so we’re lowering those percentages to offset the effect. That may make them appear to have been nerfed—however, the net result is that those percentage-based heals stay about the same as before relative to other heals.

All of these changes apply to damage-absorption shields as well. Additionally, we're toning down the power of damage absorption in general. When they get too strong, absorption effects are often used in place of direct healing, instead of as a way to supplement it. We will, of course, take these changes into account when tuning specializations that rely heavily on absorbs, such as Discipline Priests. "We want healers to care about who they're targeting and which heals they're using..." We also took a look at healing spells that were passive or auto-targeted (so-called "smart" heals). We want healers to care about who they're targeting and which heals they're using,so that their decisions matter more. To that end, we're reducing the healing of many passive and auto-targeted heals, and making smart heals a little less smart. Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets, of course.

Another of our goals for healing in this expansion is to strike a better balance between single-target and multi-target healing spells. We've taken a close look at the mana efficiency of our multi-target heals, and in many cases, we're reducing their efficiency, usually by reducing the amount they heal. Sometimes, but more rarely, raising their mana cost was a better decision. We want players to use multi-target heals, but they should only be better than their single-target equivalents when they heal more than two players without any overhealing. This way, players will face a meaningful choice between whether to use a single-target heal or a multi-target heal based on the situation.

Finally, we're removing the low-throughput, low-mana-cost heals like Nourish, Holy Light, Heal, and Healing Wave, because we think that while they do add complexity, they don’t truly add depth to healing gameplay. (We’re also renaming some spells to re-use those names. For example, Greater Healing Wave is being redubbed Healing Wave.) However, we still want healers to think about their mana when deciding which heal to cast, and so the mana costs and throughputs of many spells are being altered to give players a choice between spells with lower throughput and lower cost versus spells with higher throughput and higher costs. Here are some examples from each healer class.

All of this discussion of efficiency may cause most healers to start worrying about mana regeneration and their mana pool. To allay those concerns, we’ve increased base mana regeneration a great deal at early gear levels, while having it scale up less at later gear levels. This will make all of these changes play well even in early content such as Heroic Dungeons and the first tier of Raid content, and also play well in the final Raid tier without mana and efficiency becoming irrelevant due to extremely high regeneration values. "...we’ve increased base mana regeneration a great deal at early gear levels, while having it scale up less at later gear levels." That’s a lot of big changes for healers: reduced throughput, a more deliberate pace, less powerful “smart” heals, weaker absorbs, fewer spells, and a new focus on efficiency decisions. We’re confident that we can apply lessons learned from previous expansions to make this the best healer experience yet: more dynamic, less punishing, and frankly a lot more fun.General Changes

Smart heals will now randomly pick any injured target within range, instead of always picking the most injured target. Priority will still be given to players over pets.

Long-cast-time single-target heals, such as Greater Heal and Healing Touch, now cost roughly half as much as fast-cast-time single-target heals, such as Flash of Light or Healing Surge, and heal for roughly the same amount.

Every class has multiple area healing spells available, some low throughput and efficient, others high throughput and inefficient.

Area healing spells are tuned to be less efficient than single-target healing spells when they heal 2 or fewer targets, and more efficient when they heal 3 or more targets.

Spells with cooldowns or limitations may have higher efficiency than the no-cooldown equivalents.

Active Mana Regeneration

Another part of the changes to healing is providing a way for them to better manage their mana. There are ways to spend more mana for more healing but, we're also adding methods for healers to trade extra time or healing or more mana to use later in a fight when they really need it.Druido

Innervazione has been redesigned to now have a 2-second cast time with no cooldown, and causes the Druido to gain 2.5% of maximum mana every 4 seconds for 8 seconds. Spending any mana on a healing spell will cancel this effect.

is now a passive ability for Restoration Shaman and causes Dardo Fulminante to restore 1.25% of maximum mana each time it is cast instead of costing mana.

Glyph of Telluric Currents: This glyph has been removed.

Racial Traits

We want races to have fun and interesting perks, but if those traits are too powerful, players may feel compelled to play a specific race even if it doesn't suit their aesthetic preference. For example, Trolls' Berserking ability was extremely powerful, and their Cacciatore di Bestie passive was often irrelevant, but occasionally tremendously powerful compared to other racial passives. On the other end of the spectrum, many races had few or no performance affecting perks. We also needed to replace or update a number of racials that previously granted Hit or Expertise, since those stats have been removed.We decided to bring down the couple high outliers, then establish a fair baseline and bring everyone else up to that. We achieved that by improving old passives, replacing obsolete ones, and occasionally adding new ones where needed. Our goal with these changes is to reach parity amongst races.

Intuito Arcano is a new racial passive ability that increases Critical Strike chance by 1%.

Torrente Arcano now restores 20 Runic Power for Cavaliere della Mortes (up from 15 Runic Power), 1 Holy Power for Paladins, or 3% of mana for Mages, Priests, and Warlocks (up from 2% of Mana]). Other parts of the ability remain unchanged.

Vigore della Montagna is a new racial passive ability that increases Critical Strike bonus damage and healing dealt by 2%.

Forma di Pietra now also removes magic and curse effects in addition to poison, disease, and bleed effects, along with reducing damage taken by 10% for 8 seconds. It remains unusable while the Nano is under the effects of crowd control.

Spirito Umano has been redesigned. It no longer increases Spirit by 3%, and instead now increases 2 secondary stats by an amount scaling with character level. You can choose which 2 secondary stats it increases. This has not yet been implemented.

Ability Pruning (Updated)

Over the years, we've added significantly more new spells and abilities to the game than we've removed. This has led to the complexity of the game increasing steadily over time, to the point we're at now, where players feel like they need dozens of keybinds. There are many niche abilities which could theoretically be useful in some rare case, but usually are not. There are many abilities that we'd be better off not having. We decided that we needed to make a strong push for paring down the number of abilities each class/spec has. That means making some abilities restricted to certain specs that really need them instead of being class-wide, and outright removing some other abilities. It also includes removing some Spellbook clutter, such as passives that could be merged with others, or with base abilities.However, this doesn't mean that we want to reduce the depth of gameplay, or "dumb it down.” We still want there to be interesting decisions during combat, and for skill to matter. But, that doesn't require complexity; we can remove some needless complexity and still retain the depth and skill variance.

One type of ability that we focused on is temporary power buffs ("cooldowns"). Removing those also helps achieve one of our other goals, which is to reduce the amount of cooldown stacking in the game. In cases where a class/spec had multiple cooldowns that typically ended up getting used together, often in a single macro, we merged them, or removed some of them.

What abilities and spells got cut is a very, verydifficult question to answer. Every ability is vital to someone, so we don't take this process lightly. We hope that even if we cut your favorite ability, you can see it in the context of our larger goals. It's important to remember that the point of these changes is to increase players' ability to understand the game, not to reduce depth of gameplay.

General

The levels at which you learn class abilities have been revised to provide a smoother leveling flow.

Death Knight

Army of the Dead now deals 75% less damage.

Blood Boil has been removed and its effects have been merged into Pestilence.

Blood Parasites has been removed.

Dual Wield is now only available to Frost Death Knights.

Horn of Winter no longer generates Runic Power, has no cooldown, and lasts 1 hour.

Necrotic Strike is now learned only by Frost and Unholy Death Knights.

Raise Dead is now only available to Unholy Death Knights, summons a ghoul as a permanent pet, and has a 1-minute cooldown.

Master of Ghouls has been removed.

Rune of the Nerubian Carapace has been removed.

Rune Strike has been removed. Blood Death Knights now use Death Coil in its place.

Frost Strike now replaces Death Coil for Frost Death Knights.

Obliterate now replaces Blood Strike for Frost Death Knights.

Unholy Frenzy has been removed.

Druid

Bear Hug has been removed.

Enrage has been removed.

Innervate is now available only to Restoration Druids. Mana costs for Druids have been adjusted accordingly.

Pounce has been removed. Abilities which modified Pounce now modify Rake instead.

Rake now also stuns the target for 4 seconds when used while stealthed.

Ravage has been removed. Shred is now available to all Druid specializations and now deals an additional 35% damage while stealthed. Swipe (Bear Form) has been removed. Swipe (Cat Form) remains unchanged. Symbiosis has been removed.

Hunter

Arcane Shot is no longer available to Marksmanship Hunters.

Thrill of the Hunt now also reduces the cost of Aimed Shot when active, to preserve its value to Marksmanship Hunters.

Aspect of the Hawk has been removed.

Aspect of the Iron Hawk has been renamed to Iron Hawk, and now passively provides 10% damage reduction.

Cower has been removed as a pet ability.Distracting Shot has been removed. Hunter’s Mark has been removed. Kill Shot is no longer available to Survival Hunters. Lock and Load has been removed and its effect has been incorporated into Black Arrow, which now has a chance to cause the effect. Stampede is now a level-75 talent, replacing Lynx Rush.

Lynx Rush has been removed.

Rabid has been removed as a pet ability. Rapid Fire is now available only to Marksmanship Hunters. has been removed. Rapid Recuperation has been removed. Serpent Sting and Improved Serpent Sting have been removed.

Serpent Spread has been renamed Serpent Sting, and remains a passive for Survival Hunters. It causes Multi-Shot and Arcane Shot to also apply the Serpent Sting poison, which does instant and periodic damage.

Widow Venom has been removed. Revive Pet and Mend Pet now share the same button and changes based on whether the Hunter has a live pet.

Mage

Arcane Barrage now replaces Fire Blast for Arcane Mages.

Arcane Blast now replaces Frostfire Bolt for Arcane Mages.

Arcane Explosion is now available only to Arcane Mages.

Blizzard is now available only to Frost Mages.

Combustion now replaces Deep Freeze for Fire Mages.

Deep Freeze is now available only to Frost Mages.

Dragon’s Breath now replaces Cone of Cold for Fire Mages.

Evocation is now available only to Arcane Mages.

Flamestrike is now available only to Fire Mages.

Frost Armor is now available only to Frost Mages and is now a passive effect.

Ice Lance now replaces Fire Blast and is only available to Frost Mages.

Mana Gem has been removed.

Mage Armor is now available only to Arcane Mages and is now a passive effect.

Molten Armor is now available only to Fire Mages and is now a passive effect.

Polymorph's cosmetic variants are now all learned as spells instead of having some as a Minor Glyph that alters the visuals of Polymorph: Sheep. All of these variants (except for the automatically learned one, Polymorph: Sheep) are now grouped in a Polymorph variants flyout in the Spellbook.

Pyromaniac has been removed.

Shatter is now available only to Frost Mages.

Monk

Adaptation has been removed.

Avert Harm has been removed.

Clash has been removed.

Disable is now available only to Windwalker Monks.

Healing Sphere (the spell, not any other sources of healing spheres) has been removed. Mistweavers' Gift of the Serpent, Brewmasters' Gift of the Ox, and Windwalkers' Afterlife still summon healing spheres.

Power Guard has been removed.

Spinning Fire Blossom has been removed.

Stance of the Fierce Tiger is replaced by another stance for non-Windwalkers. (See Monk class section for additional details.)

Brewmaster: Stance of the Sturdy Ox replaces Stance of the Fierce Tiger.

Mistweaver: Stance of the Spirited Crane now replaces Stance of the Fierce Tiger.

Surging Mist is now available to all Monk specializations. It costs 30 Energy in Ox or Tiger Stance, and continues to cost mana in Serpent Stance and Crane Stance. However, it only generates Chi for Mistweaver Monks.

Paladin

Art of War has been removed.

Exorcism's cooldown now naturally has a chance to be reset on auto attacks.

Avenging Wrath is no longer available to Protection Paladins. Divine Favor has been removed. Divine Light has been renamed Holy Light. Divine Plea is now only available to Holy Paladins. Mana costs for Paladins have been adjusted accordingly. Guardian of Ancient Kings is now only available to Protection Paladins. Hand of Salvation has been removed. Holy Light has been removed. Inquisition has been removed.

Priest

Binding Heal is no longer available to Shadow Priests.

Greater Heal has been renamed to Heal.

Hymn of Hope has been removed.

Heal has been removed.

Inner Fire has been removed.

Inner Focus no longer provides any mana cost reduction.

Inner Will has been removed.

Rapture has been removed.

Renew is now available only to Holy Priests.

Shadow Word: Death is now available only to Shadow Priests.

Discipline and Holy Priests can add a self-damaging utility to Holy Fire through a new Major Glyph.

Void Shift has been removed.

Rogue

Ambidexterity has been removed.

Disarm Trap has been removed.

Fan of Knives is no longer available to Combat Rogues.

Redirect has been removed.

Rupture is no longer available to Combat Rogues.

Shadow Blades has been removed.

Shaman

Ancestral Awakening has been removed.

Feral Spirit no longer has the Spirit Bite ability.

Flametongue Weapon is no longer available to Restoration Shaman, and only causes damage on weapon swings for Enhancement Shaman.

Stormstrike and Stormblast now deal 30% more damage when Lightning Shield is active.

Searing Flames has been removed.

Flametongue Weapon damage has been increased by 40%, and Lava Lash damage has been increased to 280% weapon damage (up from 140%) to compensate.

Water Shield is now available only to Restoration Shaman and replaces Lightning Shield.

Warlock

All of the various Soulburn effects are learned together with Soulburn, instead of at different levels.

Curse of Exhaustion and Curse of the Elements now affect all enemies within 10 yards of the target, and are no longer mutually exclusive.

Metamorphosis: Cursed Auras has been removed.

Curse of Exhaustion and Curse of the Elements no longer gain a benefit from Soulburn.

Fire and Brimstone no longer applies to Curses.

Demonic Breath has been removed.

Howl of Terror is now a Level-30 talent, replacing Demonic Breath.

Drain Life no longer gains a benefit from Soul Burn.Drain Soul has been removed. Fel Flame has been removed. Health Funnel no longer gains a benefit from Soul Burn. Malefic Grasp has been removed. Its effects have been merged into Drain Soul, which Affliction Warlocks should use in its place. Metamorphosis: Void Ray has been removed. Metamorphosis: Carrion Swarm has been removed. Pyroclasm has been removed. The altered behavior it granted for Chaos Bolt is now baseline to Backdraft. Seed of Corruption now replaces Rain of Fire for Affliction Warlocks.Soulshatter has been removed. Unending Breath no longer gains a benefit from Soul Burn.

Warrior

Battle Shout now lasts 1 hour and no longer generates Rage.

Berserker Rage no longer Enrages the Warrior, generates Rage or increases Physical damage dealt. It now functions to break and provide immunity from Fears, Incapacitates, and Saps.

Berserker Stance has been removed.

Cleave has been removed.

Commanding Shout now lasts 1 hour and no longer generates Rage.

Demoralizing Banner has been removed.

Hamstring is now a passive ability that causes Mortal Strike, Bloodthirst, Revenge, and Raging Blow to also reduce the target’s movement speed by 50% for 15 seconds.

Mortal Strike now replaces Heroic Strike for Arms Warriors.

Overpower has been removed.

Rallying Cry is no longer available to Protection Warriors.

Recklessness is now available only to Fury and Arms Warriors.

Shield Wall is now available only to Protection Warriors.

Throw has been removed.

Thunder Clap is no longer available to Fury Warriors.

Whirlwind is now available only to Fury Warriors.

Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns (Updated)

Another big takeaway from Mists of Pandaria is that there was simply too much crowd control (CC) in the game. To solve that, we knew that we needed an across-the-board disarmament. Here's a summary of the player-cast CC changes:

Removed Silence effects from Interrupts. Silences still exist, but are never attached to an Interrupt.

Removed all Disarms.

Reduced the number of Diminishing Returns (DR) categories.

All Roots now share the same DR category.

Exception: Roots on 'Charge' types of abilities have no DR category, but have a very short duration instead.

All Stuns now share the same DR category. All Incapacitate ("Ipnosi") effects now share the same DR category, and have been merged with the Horror DR category.

Removed the ability to make cast-time CC spells instant with a cooldown. Removed many CC spells entirely, and increased the cooldowns and restrictions on others.

PvP trinkets now grant immunity to reapplication of an effect from the same spell cast, when they break abilities with persistent effects like Fascio Solare.

Long fears are now shorter in PvP, to account for the target also needing to run back afterward.

Additionally, we've significantly reduced the number of throughput-increasing cooldowns and procs, in order to further reduce burst damage. Please keep in mind when reading the specifics of the patch notes that some classes may have lost abilities, or had the power of select abilities reduced. These changes were made in the context of the above goals. Other classes have a reduced crowd-control ability overall. We believe that this entire package of changes will make PvP a more enjoyable experience for everyone.

Entrapment's Root effect now shares Diminishing Returns with all other Root effects. Scatter Shot has been removed. Silencing Shot has been removed. Traps and trap launchers no longer have an arming time and can instantly trigger. Traps can no longer be disarmed. now has a 6-second duration in PvP (down from 8 seconds).

's Disoriented effect now shares Diminishing Returns with all other Ipnosi effects.

Grapple Weapon has been removed.

Circolo di Pace no longer Silences or Disarms enemies. It now incapacitates targets in the area for 3 seconds, or until the target takes damage. The ability now shares Diminishing Returns with all other Ipnosi effects.

Movement Speed

Moving quickly has always been a powerful bonus in World of Warcraft; however, the logic of how various movement speed bonuses stack (or don't) has generally been inconsistent and poorly explained. Under the old set-up, each movement speed bonus would become more powerful when combined with another, so we would limit what can stack with what, and prevent certain abilities from being used when another one is already in effect. We decided to change the movement speed system to make it more transparent, with rules about stacking that are easier to understand, and with fewer restrictions.

Previously, multiple movement speed modifiers on you were multiplicative, meaning that if you had two different +25% movement speed bonuses, they resulted in a total movement speed of 56% (1.25*1.25 = 1.56).

Movement speed bonuses have been changed to be additive. The previous example with two different +25% movement speed bonuses would result in a total movement speed of +50%. The logic governing which bonuses stack with others has been simplified as well. "Movement speed bonuses have been changed to be additive."

Movement speed buffs that are self-only or is a passive effect are considered non-exclusive, and will now all stack together additively.

Movement speed buffs that are temporary or could be applied to other players are considered exclusive, their effects do not stack, and only the highest bonus gets applied (in addition to non-exclusive movement speed buffs).

Additionally, restrictions that prevented a player with a temporary speed bonus from receiving or activating a second temporary speed bonus have been removed. Both bonuses will now apply to the character, but only the one with the highest magnitude will have any effect.

All of these effects can now be applied simultaneously, but only the strongest one will have an effect.

Buffs and Debuffs (Updated)

All specializations provide some common buffs and debuffs. These are important to the game because they encourage cooperation, make you stronger when you work together with others, and promote Raid composition diversity. However, we saw room to revise these buffs and debuffs.

Weakened Armor and Physical Vulnerability were effectively redundant, both filling the role of increasing Physical damage taken by the target. We removed Weakened Armor and widened the availability of Physical Vulnerability and increased its effectiveness slightly.

The Cast Speed Slow was a debuff type that mattered almost exclusively to PvP, and made combat much less fun for casters in addition to encouraging the use of instant-cast spells. We decided that it was best to remove casting speed debuffs.

Cast Speed Slows

The following abilities no longer slow the target's casting speed by 50%.

Blood Death Knights receive a new passive ability at level 80 called .

grants a bonus to Mastery to all Party and Raid members.

Brewmaster Monks now also learn , granting 5% increased Critical Strike chance to all Party and Raid members. The following abilities now also increase magic damage taken by the target by 5% for 15 seconds.

Raid Utility Balance Updated

Various classes bring various abilities that provide utility to parties and raids. We talked about one type of utility in the Buffs and Debuffs section, above. However, there are other types of raid utility, and it's been in need of more attention. In general, raid utility, especially raid-wide defensive cooldowns, had grown too strong. So many classes and specializations had defensive cooldowns that we had to make raid damage extremely high, as raids would be stacking or chaining together multiple cooldowns. We'd like to return to a system where it's the healers who heal through the scary moments, not the damage dealers, for example.

To do so, we've established a new baseline level of raid utility that a specialization should bring, and brought everyone to that new standard by reducing the effects of some abilities, or removing some abilities altogether.

Urlo di Comando now increases health by 15% (down from 20%), and is no longer available to Protection Warriors.

has been removed.

Instant Cast Heals

Over time, healers have gained a bigger and bigger arsenal of heals that they can cast while on the move, which removes the inherent cost that movement is intended to have for them, while also limiting players' ability to counter healing in PvP. This left Silences and crowd control (which we're trying to curb) as the only ways to actually limit an enemy player's healing output. We're still preserving the option to instantly heal, but are reducing the number of instant-cast healing abilities overall. Raid and dungeon encounter damage during high-movement phases will be adjusted accordingly. Here are some examples:

Periodic Effects

There are many effects in the game which deal periodic damage over time (DoT) or healing over time (HoT). Historically, these have typically done something called “snapshotting”; they were based on your stats at the time that they were cast, and that was used for calculating their effect for their full lifetime. In Mists, if a warlock casts Corruption on an enemy while Eroismo is active, that DoT will continue to tick rapidly based on the temporary haste effect, even after Eroismo fades. This has led to some gameplay that has both good and bad sides.Snapshotting encourages refreshing those periodic effects when your stats are high, such as when a temporary buff procs. On the upside, there's a high amount of skill involved in maximizing that. On the downside, it's not intuitive, and the skill ceiling is so high that few can reach it without the use of specialized add-ons. To make matters worse, the benefits of maximizing periodic snapshotting is so high that it creates a balance problem. Players maximizing periodic snapshotting (primarily through the use of add-ons) do drastically more damage than intended. If we balance around taking full advantage of snapshotting, then the players who aren't doing so would fall unacceptably far behind in damage output.

Ultimately, we've decided that snapshotting isn't a productive mechanic for the game. The vast majority of periodic effects in the game that snapshotted no longer do so. The only exceptions are ones that do damage based on a percentage of a previous ability's damage (such as the Incendio from a Fire Mage's Fireball, or the periodic damage on a Windwalker Monk's Blackout Kick), as they inherently act as a delayed damage multiplier to those abilities.Temporary effects which buff the damage or healing of other spells specifically will continue to do so for their lifetime; for example, (which increases the damage of the shaman's next fire spell by 40%), when used on a , will continue to increase the damage of the periodic effect for its entire lifetime, despite being consumed when the is cast. "The vast majority of periodic effects in the game that snapshotted no longer do so. The only exceptions are ones that do damage based on a percentage of a previous ability's damage..." We still of course want skills and their use to embody interesting choices, and intelligent and skillful use of abilities.

Periodic damage and healing effects now dynamically recalculate their damage, healing, Critical chance, multipliers, and period on every tick.

Skilled players will still be able to take advantage of temporary power buffs like trinket procs, and you'll still want to cast your hardest hitting spells within those proc durations. The benefits just won't extend outside the trinket procs’ duration. As such, this high-skill gameplay is there, it's just rewarded more consistently. For example, a Priest’s trinket procs and an already active Shadow Word: Pain will begin dealing more damage the instant the proc effect occurs, but will return to normal when the proc duration ends. Skilled players will be able to play within these proc durations to maximize effect, but it won’t be as detrimental to output to anyone who isn’t actively and skillfully using them to their full extent.We also made another change to periodic effects. Haste has long affected the tick rate of periodic effects, and their duration has been rounded to whole numbers of ticks, in order to mostly preserve the original duration of the spell. This lead to Haste breakpoints where having specific amounts of Haste would cause certain periodic effects to gain an extra tick. Part of gearing your character involved trying to reach those Haste breakpoints, but not go over by too much. This was a fairly tedious number to manage, which was again mostly handled by add-ons and guides. With some new tech we’re now able to calculate the effect of Haste on tick time dynamically. Any fraction of a full period left at the end of an effect will do a tick of damage or healing in proportion to the remaining time. In other words, there are no more Haste breakpoints; Haste now smoothly and accurately affects periodic effects for the entire duration.

"In other words, there are no more Haste breakpoints; Haste now smoothly and accurately affects periodic effects for the entire duration." This also opened up the opportunity to revise how we handle refreshing periodic effects. For the vast majority of spells and abilities, we had a standard rule that any refresh would add the new cast's duration after the next tick of the existing effect. In simpler terms, you can refresh anywhere between the last and second-to-last tick of a DoT or HoT with no loss. Warlocks had a special passive that changed this logic to allow refreshing with no loss anywhere in the last 50% of a DoT. We liked the flexibility that this provided; though felt it was a bit too powerful. No longer tied to whole tick times, we chose to extend the mechanic that Warlocks had to all classes, but reduce it to 30%. Everyone can now refresh their periodic effects anywhere in the last 30% of the duration for full benefit, and no lost tick time.

Recasting periodic damage over time and healing over time effects that are already on the target now extends those effects to up to 130% of the normal duration of the effect.

Tank Vengeance and Resolve (Updated)

The changes to tanking made in Mists of Pandaria turned out quite well, overall. But there were a few rough parts that we're going to smooth over. The biggest one is the offensive capabilities of Vengeance. We like that tanks can provide meaningful DPS to their group, however, it swung wildly based on the fight, even surpassing the dedicated damage dealers occasionally. To solve this, we're going to remove the offensive value of Vengeance, but preserve the defensive value, by making it increase the effect of your active mitigation buttons, instead of Attack Power.

General

Vengeance has been removed and replaced with a new passive ability, Resolve.

Resolve: Increases your healing and absorption done to yourself, based on Stamina and damage taken (before avoidance and mitigation) in the last 10 seconds.

Then, to keep tank DPS meaningful, we'll be raising their damage, since it would be meager with no Vengeance Attack Power (Vengeance accounted for 70-90% of a tank's damage on high-tank-damage fights in Mists). To do that, we're increasing the damage of several prominent tank abilities, as well as having tanks also gain increased Attack Power from Mastery and Bonus Armor, in addition to the stat’s existing benefits. For plate-wearing Tank specializations, Riposte has been redesigned to convert Critical Strike into Parry, a defensive stat. That also helps keep secondary stats balanced in offensive value for them.

General

is a new passive ability for Blood Death Knights, Guardian Druids, Brewmaster Monks, Protection Paladins, and Protection Warriors.

increases Attack Power by 100% of the character's Bonus Armor.

Riposte is a passive ability for Blood Death Knights, Protection Paladins, and Protection warriors.

Riposte now gives the character Parry equal to their Critical Strike bonus from gear.

All tanking stances and similar effects now increases threat generated by 900% (up from 600%).

Maestria: Blocco Critico now also passively increases Attack Power by 8% (percentage increased by Mastery), in addition to its current effects.

Quality of Life Improvements

Facing Requirements

Strict facing requirements can be frustrating to deal with, especially in hectic Raid combat or PvP environments. In order to ease this frustration, we decided to remove or significantly loosen the facing requirements of all attacks that required the player to be behind their target.

Reforging

The original intent behind Reforging was to offer a way for players to customize their gear, but in practice it offered little in the way of true choice. Players attempting to optimize every piece of gear were well advised to look up how they were supposed to reforge an item in an online guide or tool that had already determined the optimal choice. It added yet another step to the list of things that must be done to a new item before it was ready to be equipped, reducing the joy of getting an upgrade into a chore.

If an upgrade drops, we want you to be able to equip it with a minimum of fuss. It is for those reasons that we're removing Reforging from the game.

The Reforging system and associated NPCs have been removed from the game.

All existing items that were reforged have been returned to their original un-reforged state.

Combat Resurrections

Combat resurrections are an extremely powerful tool that players have while in combat. Naturally, we apply some limitations. In Mists of Pandaria, that limit was 1 resurrection during a given raid boss encounter for 10-player modes and 3 for 25-player modes. With Flexible difficulty introduced in Patch 5.4, we erred on the forgiving side, and gave Flexible Raids 3 resurrections regardless of raid size.

In Warlords of Draenor, the Flex tech has expanded to more difficulty levels, and we needed a new system to handle combat resurrections more fairly. We knew that continuing with a constant 3 would encourage using the smallest possible raid sizes, while scaling with hard breakpoints would discourage specific group sizes just under those points. Additionally, the limit is not shown anywhere in-game, so it can be easy to lose track of how many resurrections the raid has available (or even know that the limit exists).

So we've built a new system to be more transparent, and improve usability.

During a boss encounter, all combat resurrection spells now share a single raid-wide pool of charges that's visible on the action bar button.

Upon engaging a boss, all combat resurrection spells will have their cooldowns reset and begin with 1 charge. Charges will accumulate at a rate of 1 per (90/RaidSize) minutes.

A charge will only be deducted when a combat resurrection is successful (when the target accepts the resurrection). Raid frames now show a debuff indicating that a dead player has a pending combat resurrection available. Outside of raid boss encounters, combat resurrection spells retain their normal cooldown behavior.

Resurrection Mana Costs

We reduced the mana cost of all resurrection spells to 4% of base mana, so that mana isn't an inhibitor on the Raid or Party's ability to recover from a wipe. Cast time already functions as the primary cost of these spells. Note that Priests' Resurrection spell was already at 4% of base mana, so it remains unchanged.

Glyphs

We made several improvements to the Glyph system. While leveling, characters unlock Glyph slots at several specific levels. However, in order to get glyphs, characters need to visit an Auction House (and potentially pay way more gold than an average character of that level has yet), or know a Scribe from which to request them. To solve this, we've made characters learn some Glyphs automatically as they level. Additionally, we now have the ability to make some glyphs exclusive with each other, or require specific specializations.

Many glyphs have been removed, and many new glyphs have been added.

Exclusive categories have been added for some glyphs. Other glyphs from the same category cannot be applied at the same time.

Some glyphs are now exclusive to a specialization.

All classes now learn some of their Major Glyphs as they level. Recipes for these Glyphs have been removed.

At level 25, Glyph of the following Glyphs are automatically learned by characters of the appropriate class:

Professions

Some of our goals with Professions in Warlords of Draenor are to make them more of a personal choice, and less of a mandatory “min/max” selection. To that end, we're removing the direct combat benefits of Professions. Additionally, we've made it easier to level Estrazione and Erbalismo. Pozione di Curas have gone mostly unused lately, compared to combat stat potions. We chose to solve that problem, along with a problem with Stregone utility, by having Pozione di Curas and Pietra della Salutes share cooldowns.

Herbalists can now harvest herbs throughout the game world without hard skill requirements. The yield an Herbalist will be able to harvest from each node is now determined by skill level.

Miners can now harvest mineral nodes in outdoor areas of the game world without hard skill requirements. The yield a Miner will be able to harvest from each node is now determined by skill level.

Pozione di Curas no longer share a cooldown with other potions, but instead share a 60-second cooldown with Pietra della Salutes. The cooldown will not reset until the player leaves combat.

A number of changes were made for Cavaliere della Mortes. As described above in Ability Pruning, several cooldowns were made spec-specific. Frost and Unholy's rotations remain unchanged for the most part. Blood received revisions to their Active Mitigation design to bring them up to par with changes to other Tanking specializations. We made several changes to compensate for abilities that have been removed by Ability Pruning. Ebollizione del Sangue has been removed and its effects were merged into Ebollizione del Sangue. This change effectively turned Roiling Blood into a passive ability; which we replaced with a new talent, . For Blood specialization we removed Rune Strike and are adjusting the cost of Spira Mortale so it can be used in Rune Strike's place.

Ebollizione del Sangue no longer requires a target, deals 50% more damage to all enemies within 10 yards, and spreads any diseases on targets hit to the other targets hit; but no longer deals additional damage to targets affected by Morbo del Sangue or Febbre del Gelo.

Another change was to polish up the effect of diseases on the damage of other abilities. Diseases now do enough damage on their own to warrant using them, so having them act as multipliers on the damage of other abilities was extraneous, and just cluttered up the tooltips of those abilities. We removed those multipliers, and just baked in their benefit to the corresponding base spell. This slightly reduces ramp-up time.

Assalto al Cuore damage has been increased by 30%, but no longer deals additional damage for each disease present on the target.

Disintegrazione now deals 25% more damage on both main- and off-hand weapons, but no longer deals additional damage for each disease present on the target.

Assalto del Flagello no longer deals additional damage for each disease present on the target. The ability now deals 100% Physical weapon damage, and 50% Shadow weapon damage. These two effects can independently critically hit.

In order to better balance the scaling rates and value of secondary stats for Unholy Death Knights, we reduced the power of their passive Vigore Empio ability.

Active Mitigation was a very successful design that was inspired by Death Knights' tanking style. However, it went beyond that, and Cavaliere della Mortes themselves were somewhat left behind in that regard. We made several changes to bring up the interactivity of Blood combat. This includes making Assalto della Morte cause healing based on attack power, but be affected by the new passive (see Tank Vengeance and Resolve, above), which gives it the traditional increase from recent damage. Plus, Rune Tap is being significantly improved, to become a strong Active Mitigation button. To tie those together, Blood's Mastery is being changed to affect both the size of the Sfera Sanguigna absorb, and the new Scudo delle Rune absorb.

Additionally, we removed Dodge and Parry from gear, and expect Blood Death Knights to value Haste and Crit as important secondary stats. In order to achieve that, we made Replica Immediata give defensive value to Colpi Critici, and give defensive value to Multistrike. To solve GCD-capping issues and increase the value of Haste, we also removed the passive rune regeneration increase from . Finally, we tweaked the targeting AI of Dancing Rune Weapon, and fixed it up to properly copy most Talents that you know.

now also causes auto attack multistrikes to generate 15 Runic Power. The Death Strike damage increase it provided has been moved to .

now increases your critical strike chance, multistrike chance, haste, and Stamina by 10% (up from 9% to Stamina only). It also increases the damage of Assalto della Morte by 100%.

Since the Ghoul pet is now Unholy only, that presents a problem for Patto con la Morte. We revised Patto con la Morte to not require an undead minion, but work a little differently. We left it at 50% heal, which is effectively a 33% buff to it from before (see Healing and Player Health above), and added a heal absorb for half the amount healed, instead. It should now be a relatively more effective heal for staying alive immediately, but with the downside of needing to heal through the heal absorb before you can be healed any further.

Patto con la Morte no longer requires an undead minion, and instead places a heal absorb on you for 50% of the amount healed.

There were also a few other miscellaneous changes. The Runic Power generation of Scudo Antimagia was standardized, to make it more understandable and balanced. Level-60 and Level-75 talent rows have swapped places, so the important rune regeneration talents could be acquired earlier.

Druidos have seen a number of significant changes. The loss of Symbiosis (see Ability Pruning above) will primarily impact druids' survival, as many of the abilities received through Symbiosis were defensive cooldowns. To compensate for that change, we buffed Istinto di Sopravvivenza significantly and the ability is now available for all specializations.

Istinto di Sopravvivenza is now available to all Druido specializations. Istinto di Sopravvivenza now reduces damage taken by 70% (up from 50%) with a 2-minute cooldown (down from 3 minutes), and for Feral and Guardian specializations can have up to 2 charges (up from 1 charge).

Guardian Druids had increased Armor as their Mastery for a while now. However, one of the new secondary stats available to all tanks is Bonus Armor. We didn't feel that the difference of being additive vs. being a multiplier was significant enough to warrant keeping their Mastery around. Additionally, active mitigation hasn't played out as well for Guardians as it has for some other tanks. We decided to redesign the Mastery for Guardian Druids to something that compliments the Avoidance-heavy nature of , and also to improve the usability of for more consistent damage reduction. Note that 's calculation uses the damage before any other absorbs you have, and before 's effects, so that it isn't negatively affected by any of those. Note that 's calculation uses the damage before any other absorbs you have, and before 's effects, so that it isn't negatively affected by any of the changes.

The maximum number of charges that can be accumulated for Ruggito Selvaggio has been reduced to make its uptime more consistent between short and long periods of tanking. Rage for Guardian Druids has been problematic throughout Mists of Pandaria. Most of their rage generation was extremely passive, and most of their button presses either didn't affect their survivability, or only trivially did so. We made changes to Haste and Crit, to try to solve these rage generation problems, and improve their rotation. We also added , in order to give a defensive value to the new Multistrike stat.

Guardian Druids' Mastery (Nature's Guardian) has been replaced with a new Mastery: .

Mastery: causes the Druido to gain a Physical absorb shield equal to 16% of the attack's damage when they are hit by a Physical attack. Attacks which this effect fully or partially absorbs cannot trigger .

is a new passive ability for Guardian Druids.

: Multistrikes from auto attacks, periodic damage, and Dilaniamento grants the Druid the Ursa Major effect. increases maximum health by 2% for 30 seconds. When the effect is refreshed, the remaining portion is added to the new effect.

Auto-attacks now generate 5 Rage (down from 10.9 Rage).Forma d'Orso no longer increases Haste and Crit from items by 50%, but instead causes Haste to reduce the global cooldown. no longer has a chance to reset Dilaniamento's cooldown. now generates 5 Rage, has no cooldown (down from a 3-second cooldown), and the periodic bleed effect triggers every 1 second (down from 3 seconds). but no longer has a chance to reset Dilaniamento's cooldown. Dilaniamento now generates 30 Rage, and its cooldown is reduced by Haste.Furia Primordiale now generates 5 Rage (down from 15 Rage) when you dodge or non-periodically critically strike (up from only Auto Attacks and Dilaniamento). can now accumulate 2 charges (down from 3 charges).Falciata now generates 2 Rage every time it deals direct or periodic damage, has no cooldown (down from a 6-second cooldown), but no longer has a chance to reset Dilaniamento's cooldown. can now accumulate 2 charges, its effects stack on the target, and are affected by .

Feral Druids received one major change, and few tweaks beyond what's been mentioned above in Ability Pruning and Facing Requirements. Combo Points are now stored "on the player", meaning that when you switch targets, any accumulated Combo Points remain with you. Agguato was buffed significantly, in order to bring it up to par with . Furia Primordiale was changed to let it affect area attacks as well. was reworked to better achieve its intended effect.

Combo Points for Feral Druids are now shared across all targets, and are no longer lost when switching targets.

Furia Primordiale now also grants a combo point for area attacks that critically strike the Druido's primary target.

Glyph of Savagery has been renamed , and now grants a free 5 Combo Point Savage Roar when leaving Movimento Furtivo, instead of allowing Ruggito Selvaggio to be used with 0 Combo Points.

One of our guiding principles with game design is that things should be "easy to learn, hard to master"." We have some extensive changes for Balance Druids. One of our guiding principles with game design is that things should be "easy to learn, hard to master". We're not particularly happy with the Lunagufo rotation because it was actually hard to learn, and easy to master (especially with regards to periodic damage effects no longer snapshotting). Energy and mechanics were not intuitive for many newer players. Once you became accustomed to the rotation, there wasn't much additional depth to mastering it; maintain two DoTs, hit these other two buttons whenever they light up, and spam one of two buttons in between. In order to try to make it easier to learn, but also add some gameplay depth and challenge we're making a significant revision to the rotation. The list of changes is quite dense, so here's a summary of the changes.Summary of changes to Balance:

Balance Energy is a bar that automatically cycles back and forth between Lunar and Solar sides, like night and day. The closer to one end that the bar is, the more damage that side's spells do.

That's the basics of the new Lunagufo rotation. There's room for improvement beyond that, learning to optimally maintain both periodic damage effects with the strongest effect, timing Cometa Arcanas to optimize the benefit of its buff, make use of and Uragano for area damage, and taking advantage of the strengths of each side (such as Fuoco Lunare and Fuoco Solare having significant differences now). Here are the full details of the changes.

Balance Energy system has been redesigned. Balance Energy is a bar that cycles back and forth between Lunar and Solar sides, like night and day, with a 30 second cycle time (from Lunar to Solar and back to Lunar).

Balance Energy is no longer generated through spells, talents, or other effects anymore.

has been redesigned.

inspires the Druido with the power of the moon and the sun, causing the damage of Lunar and Solar spells to be increased by up to 30% based on how close Balance Energy levels are to the appropriate side.

Example: With 0 Balance Energy, the damage bonus is evenly split between Lunar and Solar, and the Druid receives a 15% increase to damage for both spell types. With 80 Solar Energy, the Druid receives a 27% damage increase to Solar spells and a 3% damage increase to Lunar spells.

Mastery: Total Eclipse now increases the maximum damage bonus of by 12% (increasing with Mastery).

Fuoco Lunare's initial damage is increased by 100%, and the duration of its periodic damage effect is increased by 100%.

Fuoco Solare's initial damage is increased by 100%, and its periodic damage effect is now applied to all enemies within 5 yards of the target.

Cometa Arcana now has 3 charges and a 30 second recharge time (instead of a 15 second cooldown). Cometa Arcana now also grants Lunar or Solar Empowerment.

Lunar Empowerment causes the next 2 Fuoco Stellares to deal 30% more damage.

Solar Empowerment causes the next 3 Ira Solares to deal 30% more damage.

now shares charges with Cometa Arcana, and has no cooldown of its own. It also now hits all nearby enemies (up from 2 nearby enemies). now adds 1 full charge of Cometa Arcana and when it triggers, and now has a 2.5% chance to trigger on Fuoco Lunare and Fuoco Solare periodic damage. This chance is doubled on critical strikes.Uragano's range has been increased to 35 yards (up from 30 yards). has been removed.Efflorescenza (Balance) now begins snaring enemies immediately when summoned, lasts 20 seconds, and can no longer be detonated to deal damage.

causes the Druido to enter , a state where Balance Energy cycle is paused, and all Lunar and Solar spells benefit from the maximum bonus. Lasts 15 seconds with a 3 minute cooldown.

now increases the rate that Balance Energy cycles by 300% while channeled. has been removed. has been redesigned and renamed Stellar Flare.

Stellar Flare is a powerful spell benefitting from both Lunar and Solar Eclipses, dealing the most damage when they are equal. Burns the target for Spellstorm damage and cause additional damage over 15 seconds. The ability has a cast time of 1.5 seconds.

Tranquillità has an amazingly strong effect (pour a ton of healing into the whole Raid/Party), but had excessive complexity for a relatively simple task (5 different targets per tick, a short HoT, stacking, varied strength by raid size). So, we simplified it significantly. It still will be used just as it always has been.

Tranquillità now heals every Party and Raid member within range every 2 seconds for 8 seconds. It no longer places a periodic effect on each target. The total amount of healing it generates in Raids should be approximately the same as before this change.

Restoration Druids got a few changes as well. In Patch 5.4, a Glyph was introduced where you could choose to attach your Efflorescenza to Efflorescenza, instead of to Guarigione Immediata. That was a rousing success, taken by nearly all Restoration Druids, and felt like a much better situation to us, so we decided to remove the glyph choice, and bake it in permanently. Secondly, while we are fine with the playstyle where a Restoration Druid blankets their Raid in Rejuvenations, the Swift Rejuvenation passive made that too strong, and also limited their scaling with Haste. We removed that passive, to encourage using other spells more, but still allow Rinvigorimento blanketing as a playstyle choice. Presagio di Lucidità got changed to not trigger more often with Albero della Vita; it was too strong in our new healing model. Anima della Foresta was also redesigned for Restoration and to fit better with the new design for periodic effects.

has been redesigned.

now consumes all of the Druid's Rejuvenation effects on party or raid members within 60 yards and applies the effect to them instead. heals the target for an amount equal to the remaining healing from the consumed Rinvigorimento effects over 3 seconds. Healing from counts toward Efflorescenza as if it was from Rinvigorimento.

The level 90-Talent row for Druidos was designed to encourage hybrid gameplay. We decided that, while you shouldn't have to give up a significant amount of your primary role throughput in order to gain the off-role benefit, you also don't need to gain an actual benefit to your primary role throughput benefit either. We've reduced the power of their primary role benefit, making them roughly neutral in their effect on your primary role. Note that the increase to off-role healing from Veglia della Natura is not actually a buff (see Healing and Player Health above).

Balance: Casting Healing Touch no longer increases the damage bonus of the Druido's next . now causes the Druido's next Tocco Curativo to become instant cast and reset the cooldown on Cometa Arcana.

Feral: Increases the healing of Tocco Curativo and Rinvigorimento by 20%, and causes them to also heal the Druido when cast on allies. Casting Healing Touch no longer increases the damage of the Druido's next 2 melee abilities, or increases the healing of Rinvigorimento.

Heart of the Wild no longer provides an increase to Hit chance or Expertise while active, and no longer increases Stamina, Agility, and Intellect.Veglia della Natura, while active, increases single-target damage and healing caused by healing spells by 16% (down from 25%), and all single-target damage spells also heal a nearby friendly target for 35% of the damage done (up from 25%).

Cacciatores have lacked a strong distinction between the different specializations. What we mean by that is that the Cacciatore specializations all had rotations that felt similar, with Marksmanship and Survival having the most blurred identities (Beast Mastery felt well rooted in the pet). Cacciatores were also some of the most afflicted by button bloat. To address these problems, we opted to make changes to each specialization's rotation, primarily through removing abilities, and making some of them unique to each spec. This means things like Tiro Mirato being the primary Focus dump for Marksmanship, instead of or Morso del Serpente being available only to Survival. Cacciatores also had a large number of cooldown abilities, which we've also cut down (some of which we moved to the talent tree, competing with other active buttons). For a full list of what was removed, please see Ability Pruning and PvP - Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns.

One of the most difficult abilities to decide to cut was Aspetto del Falco. It began to feel fairly meaningless, since it was used virtually all of the time in combat, so might as well have just been passive. We decided to cut Aspetto del Falco, and bake in its benefit to the other abilities. The remaining aspect abilities are all utility only, and are being moved off the stance bar and made toggles.

Overall, Hunters should see a drastic reduction in the number of active buttons, and have a clearer distinction between the different specializations. With some of these changes, you may find yourself favoring a different specialization. Keep in mind that Draenor Perks, earned from levels 91 to 99, will serve to further distinguish the different specializations.

no longer appears on the stance bar and is now on the global cooldown.

no longer appears on the stance bar and is now on the global cooldown.

Glifo Carbonizzato: The ability taught by this Glyph no longer appears on the stance bar and is now on the global cooldown.

Each Hunter specialization received a revision to the burst-damage-cooldowns they have access to. All specializations now have one burst-damage-cooldown available baseline, and can add to that through talent choices.

Beast Mastery Hunters retain Ira Bestiale. Rapidità di Tiro is a good fit for Marksmanship, and we improved it. For Survival, we wanted to both increase the prominence of their traps, and give them a new damage cooldown. So, a new trap called has been created to fit that role. Note that 's base cooldown can be reduced by other passive abilities and perks, such that it has roughly a 2 minute-cooldown afterwards.

is a new ability for Survival Hunters.

places a trap with duration of 1 minute that immobilizes the first enemy that triggers it for 8 seconds and deals heavy bleed damage over 20 seconds. Damage from other sources may break the immobilization effect. The ability has a 4 minute cooldown.

now also provides its effect against all targets when Rapidità di Tiro is active.

We did a comprehensive pass on Cacciatore pet abilities. As mentioned above in Crowd Control and Diminishing Returns, all full crowd-control abilities have been removed from Cacciatore pets and replaced those with new abilities, including spreading some that were previously restricted to exotic pets. Additionally, Hunters can now tame beasts from new pet families.

The following pet families provide an ability that puts the pet in stealth mode, but slows its movement speed by 50%. The first attack from stealth receives a 20% bonus to damage: Felino, Bestia Eterea

The Mage class has good specialization distinction when it comes to their single-target rotations, but utility and area-of-effect spells were heavily shared between specializations. Commonly, these spells were redundant as well. We made many of their spells specialization-specific (as described in Ability Pruning above). And probably most significant, we made changes to several existing Talents.

was extremely strong for instant CC, which we wanted to curtail. Rather than completely remove or make it not affect CC abilities, we made it a base Arcane spell, where we don't expect that it will be a problem, since Arcane has less CC than the other Mago specs already. In its place, we've added a new talent, Evanescenza.

Evanescenza: fade into the nether, avoiding all attacks against you for 3 seconds. This spell may be cast while a cast-time spell is in progress and is not on the global cooldown. Replaces Ice Block. 45-second cooldown.

Going along with our goals to reduce cooldown stacking across all of the classes, we decided to remove Alter Time's DPS contribution. has a number of clever movement and utility uses, but in practice it was mostly being used for additional uptime of offensive cooldowns. Magos also had many redundant forms of survival utility, so we moved a utility-only version of into the Talent tree, replacing .

is now a level-30 Talent, replacing .

now lasts for 15 seconds (up from 6 seconds), has a 90-second cooldown (down from 3 minutes), and no longer affects the casting Mago's mana, buffs, or debuffs.

has been removed.

A few of the abilities reset by Cold Snap were made spec-specific, or could be overridden with Talents, so we expanded what it can affect to compensate.

The Mage Bomb level-75 Talent row, the Bomb row, was also problematic. We chose to add the Bombs to all Mages' rotations in order to spice them up a bit, to provide rotational variety. That succeeded, and we're overall happy with how they interact with your rotation in a single-target situation, but they also came with the prospect of multi-dotting (applying your damage-over-time spell to many enemies, individually), which we don't feel is an appropriate fit for Magos. Additionally, in order to make all 3 Bombs useful to all specializations, we had to lose some of their spec-specific perks. And, even more importantly, many Magos did not like DoT gameplay at all.In order to solve all of these problems, we decided to merge the 3 current Bomb Talents into one that changes based on spec. That allows us to reintroduce spec-specific perks to each Bomb, and makes room for some non-DoT alternatives.

Bomba del Gelo has been redesigned. It now lasts 12 seconds, has no cooldown, and explodes every time the target is hit by the Mage's Ice Lance while frozen. The damage per explosion has been reduced by 75% to compensate.

Bomba Vivente can once again be applied to multiple targets, can be spread by Detonazione di Fuoco, and has a normal 1.5-second cooldown. More of its damage has been moved into its explosion.

Tempesta Fatua can now only be on 1 target at a time (down from unlimited), but its secondary damage now hits all targets in range (up from only 1), deals 100% of the primary damage (up from 50%), and its damage is now increased by Arcane Charges.

Magia Instabile is a new Talent available at level 75, in the middle Talent slot.

The right level-75 Talent slot is now filled by a new Talent that varies by specialization.

Ondata di Fuoco: Cause an explosion of fiery force around the target enemy or ally, dealing Fire damage to all enemies within 8 yards, and dazing them, reducing their movement speed by 70% for 4 seconds. If the primary target is an enemy, they take 100% increased damage. Replaces Frost Nova. 25-second cooldown. Instant cast.

Esplosione di Ghiaccio: Cause a whirl of icy wind around the target enemy or ally, dealing Frost damage to all enemies within 8 yards, and freezing them for 4 seconds. If the primary target is an enemy, they take 100% increased damage. Replaces Frost Nova. 20-second cooldown. Instant cast.

Supernova: Cause a pulse of Arcane energy around the target enemy or ally, dealing Arcane damage to all enemies within 8 yards, and knocking them into the air. If the primary target is an enemy, they take 100% increased damage. Replaces Frost Nova. 25-second cooldown. Instant cast.

One of the most problematic Talent rows in the game has been the Mago level-90 row. The primary theme of the row was mana, which only Arcane Mages actually cared about. Bonus damage was added in, making it functional for all Mages, but muddled in its goals. Additionally, some of them just weren't fun to play with. We've revised the row to be purely about damage, and made them have less maintenance cost. Arcane Mages will have enough mana regeneration without these Talents to perform well.

Incanter's Ward has been removed.

Flusso dell'Incantatore is a new level-90 Talent, replacing Incanter's Ward. Flusso dell'Incantatore: Magical energy flows through you, increasing all spell damage done by 5% per stack. While in combat, the magical energy builds up to 5 stacks over 5 seconds and then diminishes down to 1 stack over 5 seconds. This cycle repeats every 10 seconds.

Invocation has been removed.Immagine Speculare is now a level-90 Talent, replacing Invocation.

Frost Mages enjoyed newfound PvE viability in Mists of Pandaria, and we intend to continue that into the future. However, we do want to clean up some rough spots, especially around their valuing of secondary stats, and the amount of instant-cast spells in their rotation. The Frost Armor and Shatter changes increase the amount of Haste/Critical chance that they can acquire on gear before they start hitting soft caps. The Shatter change also lowers the value of Critical Strike for a bit. The changes to the level-75 Talent row meant that having a Bomb spell is no longer guaranteed, so we changed the way that is triggered. We also changed 's effect, in order to give Frost mages another cast-time spell in their rotation.

The Brain Freeze effect now increases no longer makes Raffica di Colpi damage by 25%, and instant, but it can now stack up to 2 times. It also no longer triggers from the Bomb Talents, and instead has a 10% chance to trigger from Dardo di Gelo casts. Each Multistrike of Frostbolt increases that cast's chance by an additional 45%. (Total of 100% on double-Multistrikes).

The brand-new class for Mists of Pandaria, Monks, turned out to be a ton of fun. Brewmasters stayed fairly solid all expansion long. Windwalkers needed a few tweaks here and there, especially to their Mastery, and still have a few shortcomings that we hope to improve, but overall worked quite well. Mistweavers had a bit of a rollercoaster ride, veering between weak and strong over the course of the expansion. Most of our changes to Monacos will focus on Mistweavers, to try to get them just right.

About midway through the expansion, it became clear that mana was not valuable for Mistweavers. We tried some adjustments to solve that, but it proved too large of a change to make at the time. We chose to just live with that problem for the time being, and tune them around not really caring much about Spirit or mana (once they reached epic gear).

Now that we have the time to tweak things, and for Mistweavers to acquire new gear, we're going to make changes to get them in the right spot. Initially, we experimented with giving Mistwavers a 1-second GCD akin to that of the Ladro to give them a faster combat feel. However, it's proven difficult to balance. Haste is attractive to healers because it lowers not just cast time but GCD as well. Therefore, Monks valued Haste much less than other healers. We explored a few options, but ultimately landed on changing the core GCD for Mistweavers from 1 second to the standard 1.5 seconds, which you will be able to reduce with Haste. This will feel jarring at first, but we're confident that it's for the best, long-term.

All abilities available to Mistweavers now have a 1.5-second global cooldown (up from 1 second).

Fulmine di Giada Crepitante's throughput has been increased by 100%, but it no longer generates Chi for Mistweaver Monks. is a new spell available to Mistweaver Monks, instantly detonating all Sfere Curative, and causing each of them to heal a nearby ally within 12 yards of the sphere with a 15-second cooldown. Focus and Harmony is a new passive ability for Mistweaver Monks and causes Haste effects to reduce the global cooldown of spells and abilities.Sfere Curative now heal an ally within 12 yards (up from 6 yards) for 100% (up from 50%) of their normal healing, when they expire. Soothing Mist's healing has been increased by 100%, its GCD has been reduced to 0.5 seconds, but no longer heals immediately, and no longer generates Chi. for Mistweaver Monks. no longer increases Haste from items by 50%.Evocazione: Statua della Serpe di Giada now has a 10-second cooldown (down from 30 seconds).Tè della Concentrazione del Tuono no longer costs Chi, causes the next Nebbia Curativa to jump up to 4 times ( used to cause instead of causing the next Vivificazione to refresh the duration of Nebbie Curative on all targets). Its effect on Emanazione remains unchanged.

Another issue with Mistweavers is that of , which has never really played out how we had hoped. The intent with was to create an alternate play style to fulfill the fantasy of healing through dealing damage, since we knew a lot of players had that fantasy, and a new class was the perfect opportunity to satisfy that.

Having two play styles in one spec (, and traditional Misticismo, healing primarily through casting heals) proved challenging to balance, because we don't want players to take the best parts of both and stack them into an unintended superior spec. The most notorious of these cases was "Jab-Jab-Uplift". In order to solve this problem, we're giving Mistweavers two stances. will continue to be the stance from which to do traditional Misticismo. The new will be the stance to use for . You can swap stances at will, with only the cost of a GCD and any current Chi that you've accrued. The intention is that Crane Stance allows Mistweavers to trade healing for damage; it should fall somewhere in the middle between being a full healer, and being a full damage dealer.

The Spell-Power-to-Attack-Power conversion effect has been moved from to .

The Eminence effect has been moved from to .

now causes a nearby target to be healed for 35% of all damage caused by the Monaco and includes auto attacks.

Mastery: Gift of the Serpent's Healing Spheres now scale with Spell Power instead of Attack Power. Muscle Memory, Serpent's Zeal, and Vital Mists have been replaced with a new passive ability, . enhances several of the Monaco's combat abilities while in Crane Stance.

We also improved all Monk Healing Spheres. You'll no longer waste them when running over multiple at once when you only need a little healing. And we significantly improved the effect when Mistweavers' Healing Spheres expire. We also made Afterlife Healing Spheres consistent with the rest of the class.

When a player runs through multiple Sfere Curative at once, only as many as needed to heal the player to full health will be consumed (instead of all of them if the player is injured at all).

Sfere Curative from now heal an injured ally within 12 yards (up from 6 yards) for 100% (up from 50%) of their normal effect when they expire.

Afterlife's Healing Sphere now heals for the same amount as other Sfere Curative (instead of healing for 15% of maximum health).

There were several changes that affected multiple Monaco specializations. We'd like to see Monacos using Trascendenza more often, so its usability has been improved (some baseline, and some in a Draenor Perk). For Touch of Death, we like that it's a unique execute being usable only once, but found it impractical to use on bosses and have improved its usability. For Tiger Strikes, we buffed it to grant Multistrike ability which it was similar to already, and extended it to work with all Monaco specializations. To better balance the damage of Brewmaster versus Windwalker where both share many of the same abilities, we removed the damage increase provided by Tiger Stance, and increased the damage of melee abilities to compensate.

is now available to all Monaco specializations, and has a chance to trigger on successful auto attacks and their Multistrikes. It has an 8% chance to trigger while using a two-handed weapon, and a 5% chance to trigger while dual wielding.

When triggered, now grants a 25% increase to Multistrike for 8 seconds instead of a 50% increase to attack speed and double attacks for 4 attacks.

Tocco della Morte is now usable on targets that have 10% or less health remaining, or have less current health than your maximum health. The rules against players remain unchanged.Trascendenza: Transfer no longer has an energy or mana cost.

We're making a few changes that mostly affects Windwalkers, but has a minor impact on Mistweavers and Brewmasters as well. For energy-based gameplay to function well, the primary limitation on ability usage should be energy, not time. As such, we're making the following changes to address GCD-capping problems. First, we're reducing the effects and mana increase of Ascensione, because it became more powerful when combined with several of our other changes to healers. We believe that Ascensione will remain as a competitive talent for Brewmasters. Second, energy cost of Palmo della Tigre has been increased for Windwalkers. And Third, we reduced the chance for Combo Magistrale to trigger. Individually, these may sound like significant nerfs but Windwalker damage has been adjusted to compensate for these changes. The goal is not to reduce DPS while addressing the issue with GCD-capping.

Ascensione now increases energy regeneration and maximum mana by 10% (down from 15%).

There are a couple of additional changes for Windwalkers. Storm, Earth, and Fire, got buffed to make it smoother to use. We also buffed Pugni della Furia because we felt that the ability wasn't giving a strong enough damage boost given its restrictions and impact on the Monaco's rotation.

Pugni della Furia now deals 100% increased damage, and always deal full damage to your primary target; additional targets are still affected by the damage split.

Storm, Earth, and Fire no longer has an energy cost, and is off GCD.

For Brewmasters, Gift of the Ox has been modified to allow it to scale defensively with the new Multistrike stat. The Black Ox Statue has been modified to aid Monacos in establishing aggro on new enemies instead of shielding allies. We also removed the Misfire effect, as it did not live up to its original idea, and was unnecessary.

Statua dello Yak Nero no longer casts on allies and now has a 10-second cooldown (down from 30 seconds). Statua dello Yak Nero now passively attracts the attention of all enemies within 30 yards, causing a minor amount of threat each second.

no longer causes the target's melee attacks to sometimes misfire.

Dono dello Yak now has a chance to trigger only from auto attack Multistrikes, instead of from all auto attacks. It has a 100% chance to trigger while using a two-handed weapon, and a 62.5% chance to trigger while dual wielding.

We made several changes for Holy, to go along with other larger system changes to compensate for the removal of Guardiano dei Re Antichi from Holy, and merged its benefits into Divine Favor. In order to follow through on our change to merge all types of Haste %, we removed the Spell Haste % from to a Holy-only passive, so that it didn't also increase Protection's baseline Haste by 10%. Our changes to healer mana and mobility also indirectly increased the value of Guaritore Altruista by a large amount, so we brought it back down to be even in power with the other talents on its row. We also raised the range of to be consistent with other spells.

For Protection, we tweaked Fiamma Eterna in order to reduce its massive self-healing amount, and provide better balance between talents on that row. We also added a new passive, , in order to give defensive value to the new Multistrike stat.

no longer affects the periodic healing of Fiamma Eterna. It still affects the direct healing portion of the ability.

is a new passive ability for Protection Paladins.

: All heals you receive have a chance equal to your Multistrike chance to trigger , healing you for an additional 30% of the triggering heal.

We made a few additional changes to Paladinos. We revised the functionality of Martello del Virtuoso a bit, such that its performance is about the same, but its tooltip is much clearer. We also made Stay of Execution much more attractive to use as an emergency button. One big change for Retribution that isn't mentioned here is the removal of Inquisizione (see Ability Pruning), which will have a notable effect on their rotation.

Martello del Virtuoso now deals 50% Physical weapon damage (up from 15%) to the primary target, but the primary target is no longer hit with the Holy damage.

Seals no longer cost any mana.

Stay of Execution (the Holy version of ) now deals its healing in a large burst at first, and then decreasing over time (reversed from before).

We wanted to improve Seal gameplay for Protection and Retribution, so have made a few changes in that regard. Protection had three Seals, but only used Consapevolezza due to its defensive value. We've moved that defensive value into a passive for Protection Paladins, and expect them to primarily use a mixture of and now. To provide better gameplay between and , and effectively remove a button, we made transform Assalto del Crociato into Martello del Virtuoso.

Inner Light is a new passive ability for Protection Paladins and provides a chance for each melee attack to heal the Paladino.

Glifo Carbonizzato is now available only for Protection Paladins, and affects healing from Inner Light instead of .

We've made a few significant changes to Sacerdotes as well, focused mostly on reining in Discipline absorbs, improving quality of life for both healing Sacerdote specializations, and solving single-target damage issues for Shadow.Espiazione was the original damage-to-healing conversion ability, but grew out of control during Mists of Pandaria. We decided to reduce its effectiveness, to bring it more in line with our goal of it being an option to trade significant healing for significant damage (ending up somewhere between a full healer and a full damage dealer). Another place where Discipline's absorbs were too strong was in their interaction with the level-90 Talents, especially in large Raids. Near the end of Mists of Pandaria, we uncapped the AoE healing of that Talent row; that has proven to be a mistake in Discipline's case, not because it caused the level-90 Talents themselves to heal for too much, but rather because the gigantic overhealing that that produced translated into gigantic absorbs. To get back to a balanced place, we've reapplied the AoE caps to the level-90 Talents, making them consistent with all other AoE heals.

For Holy Priests, our biggest concern is with the s. We think that s are the defining abilities of Holy Priests, but that they haven't lived up to their potential. We decided to move more of their effectiveness from their raw throughput buff (which felt like a penalty for being in the wrong chakra, rather than a bonus for being in the right ) into their bonus effects, and the Holy Word spells that they grant. Please note that all Sacerdote healing spells have been retuned to account for the loss of throughput increases from s. We also returned Rinnovamento to a normal 1.5-second global cooldown (GCD), so that Rinnovamento blanketing is still possible, but less ideal without Haste. Finally, the ability for Parola del Potere: Scudo to critically strike or Multistrike is now baseline for all Sacerdote specializations instead of just Disciplins so that it continues to be a viable choice for Holy at higher gear levels.

: Sanctuary no longer now increases healing of area-of-effect spells. It now causes healing spell casts to reduce the remaining cooldown on Parola Sacra: Santificazione by 1 second instead of always reducing the cooldown by 2 seconds. by 10% (down from 25%) .

: Serenity no longer now increases healing of single-target spells. by 10% (down from 25%).

Shadow Priests had one large problem toward the end of Mists of Pandaria: single-target damage. Their AoE and multi-DoT damage was some of the best around, so they still ended up competitive on most fights. But, in any fight that was mostly single-target, they felt lacking. Additionally, one of the new stats we're adding in Warlords of Draenor, Multistrike, is almost exactly what their current Mastery, Shadowy Recall, does for DoTs. So, we took these two problems and came up with a change that we think will solve both of them. The result is a new Mastery, which primarily increases single-target damage. Shadow Priests who want to focus on single-target damage can aim for Mastery in their gearing; or, when multi-dotting is more valuable, prefer other secondary stats over Mastery.

Shadow Priest's Mastery (Shadowy Recall) has been replaced with a new Mastery: Mental Anguish.

There are a few other miscellaneous changes. One is a quality-of-life change for healing Sacerdotes. The other is a fix for a problem with , where it lasts its full duration against creatures that had no way to attack it (such as in certain Raid encounters). Note that the health reduction is to keep it where it was in health, compared to player health doubling. The third is an efficient AoE healing spell for Discipline Priests. And finally, we swapped the Level-15 and Level-60 talent rows so players are presented with core Priest themed abilities earlier in the leveling process.

Piuma Angelicas now increases movement speed by 60% (down from 80%). If cast on players, will always prefer the casting Sacerdote over others, then pick the player closest to the targeted location. If there are no players where it is targeted, it will still create a feather that can be picked up, as before. Additionally, when collecting multiple feathers, the duration will be extended instead of replaced; up to a maximum of 130% of base duration.

, , and have received additional changes based on specialization.

Discipline and Holy: The abilities now heal for 50% less, costs 67% less mana, and no longer damages enemies.

Shadow: The abilities now costs 67% less mana, but no longer heals allies.

Esplosione Sacra is no longer available via a Major Glyph, and is instead a Discipline specialization spell. Its mana cost has been lowered and its healing increased. It is intended as the efficient area-of-effect (AoE) healing spell for Discipline Priests.: No longer provides immunity to Dispels, Interrupts, and Silences. This effect will be returning as a Major Glyph.Preghiera di Guarigione from multiple Sacerdotes can now be on the same target, and can be on multiple targets from the same Sacerdote.Depurazione, , , and can now be cast while in Spirito di Redenzione form.Spirito d'Ombra no longer restores mana.

now have 10% of the Sacerdote's health (down from 20%), and damage dealt to the rooted target is now also dealt to the Tentacolo del Vuoto itself. Level-15 and Level-60 talent rows have swapped places.

There are a number of Ladro changes listed under Ability Pruning, but there are a few additional changes to note. The biggest change for Ladros is a fundamental change to how Combo Points work. They're now shared across all enemies; you can swap targets and you won't lose your Combo Points.

Combo Points for Ladros are now shared across all targets and they are no longer lost when switching targets.

In our efforts to reduce cooldown stacking across the game, we chose to remove the damage increase from Trucchi del Mestiere. And second, we decided to loosen the weapon requirements on Assassination. It's important to note that we still intend for daggers to be the optimal choice for Assassination Rogues, but this change will help Ladros who want to try out Assassination but don't have two daggers.

can now be used with fist weapons or one-handed swords, dealing 331% weapon damage (instead of 480%) when used with those weapons instead of a dagger.

Mutilazione can now be used with fist weapons or one-handed swords, dealing 137% weapon damage (instead of 200%) when used with those weapons instead of a dagger.

Assalto Funesto now deals 188% weapon damage when used with a dagger (instead of 130%).

Trucchi del Mestiere now has no energy cost and no longer increases damage caused by the target by 15%.

is an interesting mechanic that is important to Combat gameplay, but wasn't working out quite as well as we think that it could. In particular, there's basically no way to adjust when you're going to be in , other than stopping your rotation (and thus wasting energy, combo points, temporary effects, cooldown time, etc.). So, we're making an adjustment to and . The intention here is that you can use in place of Assalto Funesto when you want to delay (such as to line it up with a specific upcoming fight mechanic), and have little lost damage besides the overall uptime. We don't expect this nuanced rotation adjustment to be used by all Combat Rogues, but having a little more control over the pace of your rotation will be useful to some.

Worth noting here is the removal of Ambidexterity. This was done to reduce the amount of damage coming from auto attacks for Combat Rogues. We've increased the damage of their active abilities to compensate and make them more rewarding.

now deals 20% more damage, but no longer advances .

Among some other changes to improve Rogue AoE damage, we made a couple of baseline changes, and added a few Draenor Perks that impacts their AoE.

Fato Ineluttabile now also grants a combo point for area attacks that critically strike the Ladro's primary target.

is an extremely powerful ability, but has the downside that it adds significant disparity between character power while soloing and while in a group. We made this change to bring up the soloing Subtlety Rogue, without having a significant impact on their performance while in a group.

can now also be triggered by critical hits from the Ladro's melee Auto Attacks.

To better balance the scaling rates and value of secondary stats for Subtlety, we reduced the power of their passive ability.

now increases Agility by 15% (down from 30%).

A couple of Ladro abilities do periodic damage, but don't have an intended alternative if that periodic is already on the target. We made these abilities roll remaining damage from their previous effect into the new effect, so that it's still ideal to use them again in these cases.

's periodic damage now has rolling periodic behavior, meaning that remaining damage from the previous application is added into the newly-applied periodic-damage effect.

Emorragia's periodic damage now has rolling periodic behavior, meaning that remaining damage from the previous application is added into the newly-applied periodic-damage effect.

Sotterfugio has proved too powerful, and frustrating to play against in PvP, so we decided to reduce its defensive capabilities, while preserving its offensive power. We changed the Sotterfugio period to allow the use of stealth abilities without actually stealthing you, similar to .

Sotterfugio now allows you to use abilities that require stealth for 3 seconds after leaving Furtività, instead of actually staying stealthed for 3 seconds.

Sciamano has received a variety of changes, most of which are specialization-specific.For Elemental and Enhancement, we had a few problems to solve. Enhancement suffers from having their damage split among so many damage sources that none of it feels impressive. We changed the damage of several abilities to try to reorganize their damage into fewer, more impactful abilities, while keeping the net total the same. For a long time Elemental Shaman were one of the specs most impacted by movement, at a time where other casters were increasingly able to cast while moving.

In Warlords of Draenor, we're pulling back on the ability for many casters to deal damage while moving, and that includes Elemental. They will still have some ability to deal damage while moving, through Shocks, Unleash Weapon, and instant Getto di Lavas. For Chain Lightning, we wanted to reduce the impact of Haste soft capping, and so changed to increase damage instead of reduce cast time. Additionally, we simplified Raffica di Vento by removing its impact on threat, which no longer matters.

Feral Spirits' damage has been increased by 100%.'s damage has been reduced by 50%.Dardo Fulminante is no longer castable while moving by default. Effects like Grazia dello Spiritista can still make the spell castable while moving.Elementale Primordiale della Terra's Polverizzazione ability no longer deals damage. Searing Totem's Searing Bolt damage has been increased by 65%. no longer reduces the cast time of Catena di Fulmini, but instead now increases the damage of Catena di Fulmini by 100% (up from 70%). no longer deals direct damage, but now increases the damage of the Sciamano's next Fire spell by 40% (up from 30%). Unleash Frost no longer deals direct damage, but now always snares the target by 70% (rather than only when the target is already snared by a Frost spell). no longer deals direct damage, but now increases attack speed by 60% (up from 50%). Using Unleashed Fury with Windfury Weapon imbue active now increases Multistrike chance by 5%.Raffica di Vento no longer affects threat. no longer has a 3-second internal cooldown.

Restoration Shaman had the most passive and smart healing of any healer, and so received some reductions in that area, along with buffs elsewhere to keep them competitive. One particular change is to , which we made less effective for other players, but still just as effective for the Sciamano. We like that Sciamano could help other healers out on mana, but it was just too strong, significantly impacting how those other healers gear themselves.

Stregones received a number of cut abilities (see Ability Pruning above), but remain relatively unchanged. They saw the most change of any class in Mists of Pandaria, and so were in need of less revision this time around.We felt that Stregones brought too much unique Raid utility, so decided to tone down Pietra della Salutes and Varco Demoniaco. We moved Pozione di Curas and Pietra della Salutes into a cooldown of their own, and made them usable once per combat.

Varco Demoniacos no longer have charges (up from being limited to 5 charges). Every Party or Raid member can use them once every 90 seconds (up from 45 seconds). The maximum distance apart they can be placed is now 40 yards (down from 70 yards).

Pietra della Salute's cooldown will now not reset until the player leaves combat. Healing from this ability can no longer be a Critical Effect.

For Affliction, we're happy with their rotation. But, Drain Soul was causing them to be too strong in situations where they had a steady supply of small creatures to kill. We reduced the effectiveness of its on-kill effect in order to solve this.

Kil'jaeden's Cunning was a problematic talent. We've reduced the ability for ranged damage dealers to deal damage while moving in Warlords. Kil'jaeden's Cunning became much stronger relative to other casters. We redesigned how the ability works to be more powerful in bursts instead of always affecting only some spells.

Kil'jaeden's Cunning has been redesigned. Kil'jaeden's Cunning calls upon the cunning of Kil'jaeden to permit movement while casting Stregone spells. This spell may be cast while casting other spells and lasts 15 seconds with a 2-minute cooldown.

Finally, there are a couple of miscellaneous changes. For Drain Life, we reduced the base healing somewhat, but massively increased the effectiveness of the Glyph which increases its healing, so as to help open up more potential use in ideal situations. And lastly, we simplified Combustione dell'Ombra a bit.

We wanted to fix a few problems with Guerrieros. Prominently, we still weren't happy with Arms' rotation (and neither were many players), so we've made some more changes. The goal is to remove needless complexity while simultaneously adding more depth. As mentioned in the above section on Ability Pruning, Dominazione and have been removed for Arms Warriors. In their place, Contusione now costs less Rage, and Esecuzione has been revised to provide more dynamic gameplay throughout the whole fight while still retaining its identity of a low-health finisher.

In addition, we weren't satisfied with the Mastery for Arms. The intended flavor for Arms is about hitting with few, big, and heavy weapon strikes. Strikes of Opportunity actually went opposite of that, adding frequent little hits. We've replaced Strikes of Opportunity with a new Mastery which accentuates their intended design.

Mastery: Strikes of Opportunity has been removed, and replaced with a new ability, Mastery: Weapons Master.

causes the Guerriero's auto attack hits to generate an additional 40 Rage against targets with less than 20% health remaining. Additionally, the Execute ability no longer requires the target to be below 20% health to use, but its Rage cost is increased by 100%.

no longer increases the damage of Contusione.Assalto Mortale now generates 20 Rage (up from 10 Rage).Contusione now costs 15 Rage (down from 25 Rage) and no longer has additional effects when is active.

As with other classes, we wanted to reduce cooldown stacking. Cutting Skull Banner did a ton to help that across the whole game. But for Warriors specifically, we needed to make further changes, including merging some of the personal benefit of back into Grido di Battaglia. Also, to make up for Lancio being removed, we modified Lancio Eroico to be more frequently usable.

Lancio Eroico now has a 6-second cooldown (down from 30 seconds), but now has a 15 yard minimum range.

Lancio Frantumante no longer reduces the armor of the target; it only does damage and breaks immunities.

It also is no longer learned via any specialization, but instead through a new Major Glyph, Glyph of Shattering Throw.

Haste has long been a problematic stat for Warriors, usually being of little value. As part of our commitment to ensuring all secondary stats are valuable (except Bonus Armor for non-tanks and Spirit for non-healers, of course), we're making a significant change to Warriors, to ensure that Haste has strong, competitive value. We're giving all Guerrieros a new passive, which lets haste affect their global cooldown, and the cooldowns of their very-short-cooldown rotational abilities.

Protection Warriors have received a few notable changes. First, we removed Dodge and Parry from gear, and expect Protection Warriors to value Haste and Crit as important secondary stats. In order to achieve that, we made Replica Immediata give defensive value to Crits. The aforementioned also helps for valuing Haste.

is a new passive ability for Protection Warriors.

causes Multistrike auto attacks to trigger a , which regenerates 3% of the Guerriero's health over 3 seconds. When this effect is refreshed, the remaining duration is added to the new effect.

Fury Warriors received a few additional changes. We made a revision to the critical strike chance of Sete di Sangue to make them less crit-dependant. A new glyph has been added which gives Fury Warriors a choice for a notably different playstyle. Auto attack damage had become too high, so we also moved some damage from that into Esecuzione (which has been changed to deal damage based on Weapon Damage, instead of just Attack Power). Plus, we've updated some to spell alerts to improve usability.

's spell alert has moved to the top slot instead of the left and right slots.

Commenti

Commento di cbbakke

on 2014-05-23T14:32:08-05:00

Thought needed on spec Removedpaying attention gear stats so you have enough hit and exptertise without going over removedneed to face the right direction to attack removedneed to use more then 2 buttons removed

Come on Blizzard, there is a reason that people play WOW and you are slowly stripping it all away to make it so easy to play that even a little kid can play it. I realize that makes your market bigger but you are going to lose players who want an actual challenge.

Commento di zotheghost

on 2014-05-23T14:34:09-05:00

Wow! I'm definitely intrigued by the Balance changes. It sounds good so far I think. Still can't wait for 6.0 to drop!

Commento di melinerunen

on 2014-05-23T14:58:29-05:00

Thought needed on spec Removedpaying attention gear stats so you have enough hit and exptertise without going over removedneed to face the right direction to attack removedneed to use more then 2 buttons removed

Come on Blizzard, there is a reason that people play WOW and you are slowly stripping it all away to make it so easy to play that even a little kid can play it. I realize that makes your market bigger but you are going to lose players who want an actual challenge.

Im agree with that, but lets see what will they do in order to balance the "lack of challenge". Maybe harderd encounters or sometingh :)

Commento di Roguesaxaphone

on 2014-05-23T15:14:34-05:00

I was looking forward to mutilating with my warglaives, still love assassination though. That removal of overpower though.

Commento di Alasdaer

on 2014-05-23T15:19:05-05:00

I'm wondering about the tank changes. It's not like tanks are already good damage machines enough. Now tanks can stack crit and dish out even more damage.I'm not saying tanks shouldn't have much damage, but for what reason do we choose between tank, damage and heal? Well, tanks won't deal more damage than regular damage, probably.

@cbbakke: I think we're moving more and more in the direction of precision performing. Meaning: Tanks and healer need to deal a certain amount of minimum DPS to clear content. Gameplay won't matter as much as performing accurately for a certain amount with a correct ilvl and, not to forget, while moving out of danger zones. Don't know if that's to easy for most people. Some people still prefer to click their abilities.

Commento di PragmaticSoul

on 2014-05-23T15:19:36-05:00

I thought I saw some of the positional requirements made it back in a few days ago (via tweets)?

Commento di wrongheaded

on 2014-05-23T15:20:59-05:00

I was looking forward to mutilating with my warglaives, still love assassination though. That removal of overpower though.

It's time to remove weapon restrictions on the specs altogether. It's a relic from the era of shard bags, ammo pouches, and weapon skill - pointless mechanics that only created hassle, not depth of gameplay.

Commento di AsgardFM

on 2014-05-23T15:34:04-05:00

Just a small correction, the Guardian Druid section is talking about Savage Roar having multiple charges when it should be Savage Defence. There is also a repeated line of text around the same area.

Commento di Zeribus

on 2014-05-23T15:48:55-05:00

Heartstrike-Gone!Blood Boil-Gone!Rune Strike-Gone!

WTF? Gettin' ready to make this game a console game like D3 or what?

Commento di Manishtusu

on 2014-05-23T16:53:34-05:00

Those warrior changes (and the other classes too I guess, I was too distressed to look into others)...

At first, they made stance-dancing obsolete.

Now they're making rage management pretty much non-existant too.

Seriously, what is wrong with a bit of challenge? The game should be far more complex, with rotations that require a certain degree of attention to execute perfectly. They should just make casual content easier and add challenging solo content at the same time. I would bet my backside that there are a serious number of people playing wow who would like the game moving in that direction.

Commento di TheKubizz

on 2014-05-23T17:20:46-05:00

Im feeling great with hunter changes, can't wait!

Commento di Martoch

on 2014-05-23T17:28:36-05:00

So Riposte is terrific for plate-wearing tanks... but for Bears there's little desire for crit aside from self-healing, and Brewmasters get... what exactly?

Commento di Aethrios

on 2014-05-23T17:50:23-05:00

Very minor nitpick, in the wowhead-grey commentary near the top, under druid changes (right after the Balance section): "oul of the Forest" is probably supposed to be "Soul of the Forest"?

Commento di Rankkor

It makes blood spec far too simplistic. We now basically either use Pestilence or Death Strike all the time. With no single-target blood rune spender.

I'd be happier if they had removed the cleave altogether from Heart Strike, buffed its damage so that it deals more single-target damage than Pesti, and then we use our runes accordingly depending on the situation. Heart Strike against single-target, Pestilence for AoE, and Death Strike.

As it stands, its gonna be a little boring to be using mostly 2 spells as my entire rotation. I get that they're trying to simplify things, but they're making blood far too simple.

Prot Warriors get some complexity, with Shield-Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Heroic Strike, Execute, Thunderclap, and Heroic Throw as their damaging rotation.

Prot Pallys also keep some complexity, with Crusader Strike, Hammer of the Righteous, Shield of the Righteous, Divine Storm, Consecrate, Hammer of Wrath, Divine Wrath, and Judgement as their damaging rotation.

Bear druids too, with Lacerate, Maul, Mangle, Swipe, Thrash etc-

Brewmasters are even worse than the DKs in terms of variety since they are mostly relegated to Keg-Smash/Jab and BoK for singletarget (while fitting a few Tiger Palms when empty of energy) and SCK/Keg-Smash with Breath of Fire for AoE. Hell, if you take Chi-Explosion then that single spell is used for everything. Your entire damaging rotation is that spell over and over and over, in single and AOE damaging situations.

Blood Spec DKs? what do we use as our rotation? Pestilence, Death Strike, Death Coil, and D&D. That's it. Come on, gimme a break. 4 buttons?

Commento di Rankkor

on 2014-05-23T19:00:12-05:00

So Riposte is terrific for plate-wearing tanks... but for Bears there's little desire for crit aside from self-healing, and Brewmasters get... what exactly?

Actually bears and brewmasters have had long-standing benefits from crit.

Bears get extra rage during crits which helps them use their active-mitigation abilities like Savage Defense and Frenzied Regeneration.

And Brewmasters get stacks of Elusive brew on every crit which allows them to use Elusive Brew to increase their dodge.

The only tanks that had almost no benefits from crit at all were paladins, warriors, and DKs. Riposte fixes that somewhat.

Having said that, I think I liked the first iteration of Riposte better (on the first draft of alpha notes, Riposte had a different function: when you crit with an attack you gain a buff called Riposte, which increases your chance to parry an attack by 100% until you parry an attack. So 1 guaranteed crit hit, means 1 guaranteed parried hit.)

Commento di GaaraFredNorris

on 2014-05-23T19:12:48-05:00

We felt that Warlocks brought too much unique Raid utility, so decided to tone down Healthstones and Demonic Gateway. We moved Healing Potions and Healthstones into a cooldown of their own, and made them usable once per combat.

That's business speak for "Look guys, you're standing out too much in terms of usefulness. I mean smart Locks can pretty much save a raid group if they're quick enough. And the Healthstone/Potion/Lifestone (or Dying Breath) macro that saved you so many times when death was right at your door? Yeah.. get ready to trash it and become another facerolling clothie."

Finally, there are a couple of miscellaneous changes. For Drain Life, we reduced the base healing somewhat, but massively increased the effectiveness of the Glyph which increases its healing, so as to help open up more potential Drain Life use in ideal situations. And lastly, we simplified Shadowburn a bit. Drain Life now heals for 30% less than before. Shadowburn no longer generates any mana. Glyph of Drain Life now increases the healing of Drain Life by 100% (up from 30%).

...this is an insult to Locks. Hands down. I've had mine since BC and I distinctly remember how Drain Life saved me so many times when leveling (Used Voidhunter to steal all the aggro so I could get in quick heals while healthstone was on cooldown).

Commento di Alasdaer

on 2014-05-24T03:32:49-05:00

...this is an insult to Locks. Hands down. I've had mine since BC and I distinctly remember how Drain Life saved me so many times when leveling (Used Voidhunter to steal all the aggro so I could get in quick heals while healthstone was on cooldown).

Of course you have your lock since BC... that's then they were OP. I had one since vanilla, still remembering MC with a 21/0/30 spec.

Your point is leveling. Then use the glyph while leveling and switch it for endgame. I guess that's what they intended. They want you to be more fragile, which cloth wearers should actually be, while still giving you the choice to upgrade your self healing at the cost of a glyph. Sounds fair to me.Since you mentioned BC: I still remember immortal locks in BGs, leeching themselves full health, no matter how harsh they were attacked. Ofc we have to see it in action first, but this sounds like balancing to me.

Sometimes we have to be fair to Blizz. It's not like they want to do as any harm...

Commento di robbiedehand

on 2014-05-24T05:02:42-05:00

Prot Warriors get some complexity, with Shield-Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Heroic Strike, Execute, Thunderclap, and Heroic Throw as their damaging rotation.

Heroic strike you hardly ever use unless you swimming in rage somehow and/or taking very low dmg and heroic trow hit like a wet fish for years now.

Commento di Adamsm

on 2014-05-24T05:05:29-05:00

Prot Warriors get some complexity, with Shield-Slam, Revenge, Devastate, Heroic Strike, Execute, Thunderclap, and Heroic Throw as their damaging rotation.

Heroic strike you hardly ever use unless you swimming in rage somehow and/or taking very low dmg and heroic trow hit like a wet fish for years now.

Which means that they are going to be changed; and Heroic Throw is good when it's mixed with Glyph of Gag Order so you have a ranged silence.

Commento di GaaraFredNorris

on 2014-05-24T09:31:51-05:00

...this is an insult to Locks. Hands down. I've had mine since BC and I distinctly remember how Drain Life saved me so many times when leveling (Used Voidhunter to steal all the aggro so I could get in quick heals while healthstone was on cooldown).

Of course you have your lock since BC... that's then they were OP. I had one since vanilla, still remembering MC with a 21/0/30 spec.

Your point is leveling. Then use the glyph while leveling and switch it for endgame. I guess that's what they intended. They want you to be more fragile, which cloth wearers should actually be, while still giving you the choice to upgrade your self healing at the cost of a glyph. Sounds fair to me.Since you mentioned BC: I still remember immortal locks in BGs, leeching themselves full health, no matter how harsh they were attacked. Ofc we have to see it in action first, but this sounds like balancing to me.

Sometimes we have to be fair to Blizz. It's not like they want to do as any harm...

If you're thinking I picked Lock then because it was OP, I'm afraid I'm going to have to shoot that down. I'd been toying with the thought in Vanilla but I, as is still true to this day, HATE DoTs. Health ticking away from curses/banes as opposed to big bursty numbers? Boring. And since Affliction was the only spec that "worked" at the time, I waited for when the other two specs would be fixed.

...plus I mean c'mon. All those demons in Outland waiting to be enslaved? ;D

And leveling isn't the only thing affected. Locks used to be Off-Healers of sorts in raids/dungeons. I still remember running around the group giving out Healthstones to everyone as they fought Illidan. Ritual of Souls was a GODSEND come LK. And as for fragility? Yes they're trying to make you more fragile and less of a Mage-Tank of sorts.. but isn't that what set us apart from the other 2 clothies? Our damage output wasn't AS high as a Mage's. We couldn't heal nearly as well as a Priest. But damn, we could take just a bit more punishment than either one. It looks like we're being made out to be effectively the SAME as them now. Sameness is boring.